SearchSoftwareQuality.com survey on Agile processes is out. The Web site asked its readers a series of questions on team-oriented development issues.

The take-away: Requirements gathering is still hard; waterfall methods are still as prominent as Agile methods; and Use Cases are here to stay despite a push toward User Stories for requirements modeling.

Take a look at the SearchSoftwareQuality.com Agile Trends 2008 Survey and related articles and you will see what the overall team thinks about these compelling trends. Tell us what you think.  Happy Fourth of July!

The USENIX conference is a technical undertaking dedicated to all things UNIX and some things Linux. Actually, it is nothing less than the premier event for system programmers.

Despite the UNIX-leanings, USENIX in recent years has featured some Microsoft experts, usually from the company’s research arm.  This year, at USENIX in Boston, Benjamin Livshits and Weidong Cui of Microsoft Research shared a view on the company’s work on JavaScript worms.

In the paper they proposed Spectator automatic detection and containment solution for JavaScript worms. . The Spectator software examines the traffic between a Web application and its users, looking for long propagation chains associated with worms.

Document generation is nobody’s favorite task. Microsoft has had a pre-beta automatic document generator brewing for a number of years that would help take classes, code and the like, and create documentation, saving some onerous tasking.

This long-running project took on an open-source tenor with a Codeplex download. It is suddenly dark.

Apparently, the source code was not available, making it less than open source. Microsoft apologized, and pulled the rev from Codeplex. A free download, without open-source panache, can be found on Microsoft’s download site.

The lights dim in the keynote hall, the music comes up, and Microsoft’s leader Bill Gates is announced to the developer legions at Tech Ed for the final time. That is the scene on the first week of June in Orlando as Bill Gates makes one last keynote before moving on, leaving his day job at Microsoft to take over the reins at his charitable foundation.

What would the computer and software businesses be like without Gates? Would pre-PC computer companies like IBM and DEC have held eternal sway? People can differ on the degree of responsibility Gates should share for a technology revolution that put more computing power within the reach of more programmers. But it is surely significant.

In the face of today’s open-source software movement it is hard to remember that, in his day, Bill Gates stormed the barricades in the name of egalitarian computing, sort of. What do you think? Let us know.

Microsoft’s recent discussion of mesh computing raises a few questions. For some details on what it is, go to the LiveMesh pages. The company has rattled about a lot of ‘Live” initatives, but this may be the first one with legs. Now, we are going to drop the mesh term immediately, and start to use ‘Cloud’ to describe whatever it is Ray Ozzie has been concocting - it is a more widely used term. Just think of it as a Grid on steroids, or rather a subset of a Grid on steroids.

Now the questions.

Who will the Microsoft Cloud effect? Seems like consumers are the target. It appears for now a way to connect one’s different electronic files and such. It may sneak into the enterprise, of course, just like Lotus 1-2-3 did.

Will it work? The answer there is yes, it will work about as well as most software; meaning, it will work much of the time, but you will come to curse it on occasion. Does IT have higher standards than individuals do on the question ‘does it work?’ - well, that is an open question.

Who is the competition? Basically, it is the nemesis called Google. Google has its own Cloud computing solution a’brewing, and Microsoft will have to meet the Valley Search Wizards of Googledom on that plain of battle because…well, because that’s what they are supposed to do. This is not mano on mano, no. It is geek-o on geek-o.

Of course, a wild card in the Cloud race is Yahoo. As you may recall, Microsoft is courting Yahoo with all the ardor of a CPA romancing a distant society deb. It is hard to guess how that will play out, but there is much about Yahoo that Microsoft will have to come to grips with. Yahoo has its own Cloud computing initiative - it has a lot of computers sitting around down on the farm, you know - which, like a lot of things at Yahoo, does not exactly work the same way as the Microsoft cloud alternative. As Blogster Par Excellance Mary Jo Foley points out, meshing these two platforms could be a real mess. Well put, Foley!