Biweekly roundup: The Goal

What is the goal of a business organization? To make money, or in a software development sense to provide value.
More precisely, in the case of a software development team, to deliver as many features as possible (throughput) while minimizing the developers time (operational expenses) and the amount of Work-In-Progress features which are stuck inside the development or testing phase without having been deployed (inventory).
I'm reading The Goal by Eli Goldratt (and apparently I am the only one at ASP), the book that introduced the Theory of Constraints and transformed these goals into a process for improving production. It's really fashionary these days to transport industry-related concepts into software development. :)
The lesson I am learning so far is that targeting the wrong metrics, like the amount of time worked by each person, is not what moves us towards The Goal. Code coverage is one of our tools, but if our software never gets deployed it is the most useless of metrics.

While I'm finishing the book, please enjoy my articles published in the last two weeks.
First week
Practical PHP Refactoring: Move Field is about moving private members between nearby objects.
What new feature in PHP 5.4 is the most important to you? is a poll on the release candidates of PHP 5.4
Practical PHP Refactoring: Extract Class is one of the most underused tools for isolating logic.
Phantom JS: an alternative to Selenium is an headless browser we experimented for end-to-end testing of web applications.

Second week
Which browser do you consider the fastest? is a poll on current browser speeds.
Symfony 2 from the eyes of a ZFer is my first date with the new framework.
Practical PHP Refactoring: Inline Class is about Extract Class performed in the opposite direction.
Practical PHP Refactoring: Hide Delegate tells us one of the ways to follow the Law of Demeter.