From PVRblog: TiVo announces new developer tools:

The latest bit of information to come out is that TiVo is going to be opening up more to developers. The three new tools are TiVo Video Publisher, TiVo Multimedia Web Services API and TiVo Service Integration.

Here are more details and some interesting demographics about TiVo users. Could TiVo be tyring to head of MS and Cable companies by keeping their boxes a step ahead technologically? With these service, it becomes more than just a box for watching television and more like a MythTV box.

ACM today released a survey of IT/software development projects to identify the most common causes of failure and developed a tool to assess what the risk of failure for a given project is.

As part of a multiyear research program on software project risk, we asked MIS directors in 60 organizations to make 720 separate project evaluations (see "How the Study was Conducted"). The purpose of the study was to understand the relative importance they ascribed to the software project risk drivers described earlier. The results revealed that the most critical risk driver was the choice of methodology---a result that we were not expecting---followed by customer involvement, use of formal project management practices, similarity to previous projects, project complexity, and requirements volatility (see Figure 1).

It's interesting to note that of the six key drivers of failure, complexity ranks #5. While the most important driver was "choice of methodology", which means that one approach is not always going to work across different engagements. For a small projects, a more iterative methodology might be a better fit but you should keep in mind the budgeting and staffing implications that would result.

For example, a methodology such as rapid prototyping relies on iteration to uncover novel or poorly understood user needs. In contrast, a structured methodology emphasizes structure over iteration and might be more useful for managing larger projects where requirements are better understood."

Finally, #6 emphasizes that getting requirements right is both difficult and important. All software projects struggle with this to one extent or another.

"Building a system on volatile requirements is like attempting to build a structure on a foundation of sand. Tweaking an unfinished system to match shifting requirements requires additional programming effort and expensive reworking. Even if requirements are correctly elicited, there is no guarantee that they will remain unchanged over the project trajectory. Both changing business environments and fickle customers can contribute to requirements volatility. A certain level of requirements volatility has come to be expected in software projects, which may explain why this factor emerged with the lowest weighting among the six drivers of project risk in our study."

I'm not sure of the value of their 1 minute risk assessment tool to produce a number that "predicts" project risk score. (). Different folks could score the factors differently but it could be a valuable way to evaluate project performance along the way (identify areas of concern for managers and developers to focus on) and at the end of a project.

Gizmodo, Wired, and PVRBlog are reporting that TiVoToGo is now available. For now, the service is limited to copying shows from your standalone series 2 TiVo to a Windows PC. You'll need the latest version of the TiVo Desktop software, and you'll want to read this post from the community forums. Supposedly they're working on a Mac client for the software, which I'll be looking forward to, if only for research purposes. Theirs very little TV that I'd really want to save for viewing this way except for DC United and other soccer games. At least it'll give me a chance to move those recordings off my TiVo to free up some room.

There are a number of limitations however, which may make you consider getting a ReplayTV box instead which isn't as limited. Some shows won't be eligible for recording, you won't be able to use this if you're TiVo has a DVD recorder until later this year, and to burn shows to DVD you'll need some third party software. Although, now that shows can be put on a PC, it's only a matter of time until someone figures out how to liberate them from their DRM cage.