I have the dubious honor of being the subject of Matt Terski's last blog post from quite some time ago, but The Terski is blogging again, this time at The Use Case Blog - sponsored by his company Serlio Software.  While the articles mostly show their worth all by themselves, keep in mind that Terski and his partners are no strangers to the Tool space, having previously been at a little company you may have heard of - Rational.

I definately agree with the latest post: http://blog.casecomplete.com/post.aspx?id=2c94856f-2e99-464a-86ba-c9184c393fd3

There is a consulting company here in Milwaukee, one that I generally like, who is going after the "Application Lifecycle" segment fairly hard.  Their goal is to use Team System to help clients tie every line of code back to a business goal.  While this may seem admirable on the surface, I Recoil in Horror from this type of thinking.  What benefit does a business think it will get from doing this?  Is squashing creativity and necessary risk taking so important?  There is a principle in Physics that states the act of measuring something alters the results obtained from the measurement.  Most business people today in the upper echelons of a publicly traded company would be happy to tell you the detrimental effects that Sarbanes-Oxley has on their day to day operations, so why impose something even more draconian on software development?

The bottom line is that many, many features of popular software development or requirements tools are much better at selling licenses than they are at solving any real problem.