All of dave West's Content on InfoQ
Latest featured content by dave West

- SOA
- Topics
- Book Review,
- Governance,
- Business
A review of Michael Poulin's book, Ladder to SOE. Michael's book shows how to use the principles of service orientation to align IT with the business, and the business with market dynamics - creating the Service Oriented Enterprise. Becoming an SOE requires new habits of service-oriented thinking and Michael points these out along with techniques for effectively using them.

- Agile
- Topics
- Agile Techniques
Scrum and agile methods promote the establishment of a product backlog. Some leaders of the Lean community feel that the product backlog is "waste." This article argues that Lean advocates that see backlogs only as "an inventory" of things to be done are making the classic mistake of viewing software development as a production process. Backlogs are fundamental to Agility.

- Agile
- Topics
- Software Craftsmanship,
- Adopting Agile
"Being Agile" is a state of mind achieved when the practitioner has transcended Agile practice (phase three of agile according to Kent Beck). This presentation will show how following agile values, ideas, and practices lead the practitioner to the threshold of transcendence. We will also talk about how to take the final step: from "Doing Agile" to "Being Agile!"
News by dave West
- Architecture
- Topics
- Operations,
- Cloud Computing,
- Security
David Durham, manager of Intel's Security and Cryptography Research group, was recently interviewed on the subject of Internet and Computer Security. The interview covers a wide range of topics including the "monetization of malware," Cloud-based detection of malware, security of data stored in the Cloud, "Botnets in the Dark Cloud," and malware as a tool in geo-politics.
- Architecture
- Topics
- Code Analysis,
- Artifacts & Tools,
- Agile Techniques
The latest releases of Fisheye 2 (source code repository browser) and Crucible 2 (code review) from Atlassian offer a completely revamped UI, one that allows developers to follow the team (a kind of social networking) as well as follow the work. Crucible 2 also supports the idea of "iterative code review."
- Architecture,
- Agile
- Topics
- Collaboration,
- Project Management,
- Communication,
- Agile in the Enterprise
IBM Rational and InfoQ preent an eBook, Scaling Agile with C/ALM, "dedicated to all of the functional and dysfunctional organizations that are eager to break down the organizational and cultural silos, and become a finely tuned software delivery machine." The eBook explores the barriers to team integration and scaling and then shows, in detail, how to overcome these obstacles.
- Architecture,
- .NET,
- Java
- Topics
- Artifacts & Tools,
- Data Access,
- Clustering & Caching
Gemstone has released Gemfire Enterprise 6.0 featuring a cluster resource controller that continuously monitors resources in the distributed data fabric. GemFire enables applications to sense changing performance patterns and proactively provision extra resources and trigger rebalancing of predictable data access, throughput, and latency without the need to overprovision capacity.
- Architecture,
- SOA
- Topics
- Announcements,
- Operations,
- Deployment / Datacenter,
- Cloud Computing
IBM announces three new ways for businesses to utilize cloud computing: standardized services on the IBM cloud, private cloud services behind the firewall (managed by the business or IBM) and Cloud burst a way to seamless incorporate secure public clouds to accommodate "overflow" demand for services.
- Architecture
- Topics
- Platforms,
- Web Frameworks,
- Community
Facebook offers an open standards platform for creating social network applications. Josh Elman discusses the concept of social networking and how the Facebook platform addresses issues of identity, of social graphing, and sharing (via its Open Stream API). His presentation explored the nature of a social graph and the "virtuous cylcle of sharing."