Project Management tools can collect information about time required to produce specific product sub-components (features, user stories). Some agile software development tools, like Pivotal Tracker collect information about actual outcomes based on detailed descriptions of requirement. The tools also collect information about who was involved in developing those results.

Given information like this, it is quite possible to solve some interesting problems for larger organizations. For example, given a set of developers, in an environment with budget constraints, one can find the optimal price (cost) for development output units (velocity) given developer wages and marginal productivity. One can also look at this from a hedonic perspective where you look at the optimal allocation of skills.

Ultimately, this could help firms find wages that reflect value added, or know how much they should be willing to pay for given skills. There is also the possibility to saying "we have a project that requires this mix of skills, what is the optimal set of people we should allocate to this project, given the value they add to other competing needs in the organization?"

The image below shows a little detail fleshing out the basic framework for solving this general class of problems. 

The following links to a live example of code running in our Palm Pre Mojo Simulator.  It is an extension of the simple RSS application in the O'Reily webOS book. 

http://www.eastagile.com/uploads/news/

Please note that the simulator is only fully functional in Apple Safari version 4 beta since this is the only browser that supports the HTML5 which is used in Palm Pre applications.

As part of our Pre development preparations, we've created a simulator of the Palm Pre Mojo framework. It allows working Mojo/javascript code to be written and executed just as it would on an actual Palm Pre.

    * Provides exactly the same API as the real Mojo framework so that the application-level code will work correctly on Palm WebOS
    * Based on the API specification written in the Palm WebOS book
    * Can support
          o application with multiple stages
          o background process
          o notification system
          o widgets
          o database transaction
    * Cannot support
          o device services request

We have a presentation on Palm Pre webOS development and our simulator.

And another presentation on Palm Pre webOS in general: google doc.