We have been pair programming at my company for about two years now. Our take on this is that pair programming is the norm. All activities are assigned to pairs and we usually start out using pair programming but might split up if appropriate as the activity progress.

Since a couple of weeks our team has faced a new challenge. We are now a geographical distributed team. The main team resides in Linköping but we now also have one team member in Stockholm and one in Sundsvall. I honestly thought that we now would have to give up pair programming but it seems that this XP practice works fine even when the pair is separated by 500 km. The tools we use is simply VNC and Skype. I haven't tested myself yet but the pairs that have seems to think that it works just fine.

Thought I'd kick start this blog with some predictions for the upcoming year 2009. So here goes:


Scrum backlash
First of all let me start by telling you that I've been driving a change to Scrum at my company for the last two years and I think it's a really sound way of doing software development. It puts full use of the talent of the team and reveals where there needs to be changes done. However, with everything that is being heavily hyped and sold as a silver bullet there will be a backlash.

Open Source growth
What we've seen the last couple of years is that Open Source has gone from providing infrastructure like web servers to leverage complete enterprise solutions. As the economic pressure hardens the drive for Open Source solutions will be even greater than before.


The cloud is only air
During the next year we will see other companies release cloud computing services to match Microsofts and Googles offers. However we wont see many application deployed on these platforms. What we will see is virtualization becoming mainstream to lower the IT cost for many companies.


AJAX dies
AJAX is nothing more than a way to deal with bad technologies for build rich Internet applications. Now there are much better alternatives around as Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX and maybe even XULRunner.


The return of XML
Lately it has been very popular to hate XML. When releasing a new piece of software the success is given if you can put the words “no XML needed” on first page. The reason it is hated is because for some time it was used for everything. Even scripting like in the case of Ant. Of course this is a bad idea but for many purposes XML is a very good choice of data representation. GUI layout, object representation to mention a few. This fact will be acknowledged in the upcoming year. One sign of this is that many will prefer Silverlight and Flex over JavaFX for their natural XML based GUI layout languages.


OSGi stays an obscurity
Although OSGi is a technology that will change and simplify the way we write complex Java enterprise applications we wont see it go main stream any time soon.


International breakthrough for Baskery
When Nashville producers get their eyes on these three girls, Baskery will be the next big Swedish music export.


Lyoto Machida becomes a champion
With his traditional karate technique Lyoto will become the UFC light heavy weight champion.