Obscured by Clouds
Russ Miles and Toby Hobson outline many factors to be considered when adopting a cloud solution, creating a wider view of the cloud from the development and business perspective.
Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
Alistair Cockburn is a signatory of the Agile Manifesto, a book author, a keynote speaker at numerous Agile conferences, and most recently, the spokesperson for ICAgile.org, a credentialing body offering several levels of Agile certification. This is a multi-part interview that covers a wide range of current topics in the Agile space.
Microsoft Web Farm Framework (WFF) is a free IIS plug-in used to provision and manage systems in a web server farm, enabling the installation and configuration of software components across the farm plus support for automated deployment of ASP.NET applications.
Cloudant the company behind CouchDB just released Java View Server for CouchDB. That means that not only Erlang and interpreted languages like Javascript or Python can be used to write Map-Reduce jobs but also JVM based languages.
Agile does not necessarily mandate or recommend the use of tools. Ideally the development could be done on a command line interface with requirements present on index cards. However, in the last few years, several tools have emerged and they have acted as a catalyst to successful Agile development. Migan and Gaia recently conducted a survey to find out the use of such tools in the Agile space.
Jason Weber, Lead Program Manager responsible for Internet Explorer Performance, has released some internal data showing where IE 8 spends most of its time while preparing a page then rendering it, suggesting what websites should be focusing on.
CloudBees introduces it's fist PaaS offering, Haas (Husdon-as-a-Service), that liberates the continuous building and testing of projects into the cloud where the IT-free setup, configuration, and elastic resource allocations can be taken advantage by anyone.
Stephen Colebourne, of Joda Time fame, ignited a small debate when he released Joda Convert: a Java library to convert basic Objects to and from Strings using annotations. InfoQ surveys the options when transforming from one format to another.
Rod Johnson details VMWare's new Cloud Application Platform Vision, vFabric. It is based on all SpringSource assets and VMware's virtualization technology. Now that nearly all major actors of the Cloud are aiming at PaaS, it may be time to ask whether IaaS is "dead"? and whether PaaS will be able get mindshare of most IT organizations?
JBoss has published the results of messaging throughput benchmarks against the leading enterprise messaging servers on the market that implement the Java Message Service (JMS) API. In these results HornetQ demonstrates superior performance compared to the other products.
There were a number of sessions at Agile 2010 focused on usability and user experience. Samantha Starmer from REI presented a session titled "Make stuff people can use" that provided practical advice and pragmatic ideas on bringing usability into agile projects, even when there isn't a usability expert as a member of the team.
IBM WebSphere ILOG BRMS: The Case for Architects and Developer
Managing Agile: Transforming the Three Dysfunctions of Management @ QConSF Nov 1-5
IT Quality Health Assessment Tool
Extending virtualization in the data center with application infrastructure virtualization
Russ Miles and Toby Hobson outline many factors to be considered when adopting a cloud solution, creating a wider view of the cloud from the development and business perspective.
Kelley Horton discusses the reasons why her organization transitioned to Lean-Agile, the approach used and the visual tools helping them minimize WIP, concluding that visibility leads to success.
Alex Blewitt, Kevin Seal and Alex Buckley answer Java modularity-related questions: when is modularity needed, how to address it, and what are the improvements in OSGi-based development.
Adam Blum discusses the current trends in mobile development and smartphones, trying to predict what will happen in this area over the next 5 years so a developer would know what to expect.
Roy Osherove discusses the difficulties met when trying to test code embedded in a framework (cog), presenting several solutions to create unit tests for cogs, using Silverlight code as example.
This short article is a first-person case history of someone taking up Agility for the first time. It covers the problems and reactions that are common to most teams and most developers.
Scott Chacon talks about the technologies that power GitHub (Erlang, Redis,...), and the benefits of Git as a version control and as a storage system. Also: ShowOff, a JS-based presentation tool.
Israel Gat, Erik Huddleston and Stephen Chin present how Inovis realized a higher product throughput by using three unconventional Kanban practices and a Lean Release Management tool called APROPOS.