In the last couple of years terms like Specification by Example, Executable Specifications and Feature Injection have showed up quite frequently in the community, often in relation to Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) or tools like Cucumber or SpecFlow. InfoQ have talked to some of the leading experts in this domain about what these practices are and how they relate to BDD.
On 18th January, wikipedia.or among other estimated 10,000 web sites stopped their service in order to protest against the US legislation planning to endorse SOPA and PIPA. Software engineers might think, that they are not affected by the legislation, especially if they are outside the U.S., but considering Big Data, Cloud Computing and other trends this could be a rather naive perspective.
With 2012 technology salaries on the rise now may be the time for you to start your job search. This article covers the emerging trends in IT employment in 2012 and how it will impact you as an IT and software professional.
Microsoft's Neal Gafter, who was primary designer and implementer of the Java SE 4 and 5 language enhancements and now works for Microsoft on .NET platform languages, discusses the impact of Oracle's acquisition of Sun on Java,makes the case for adding segmented stacks and a meta-object protocol to Java,, and offers some insights into how Java and C#/.NET compare.
Elisabeth Hendrickson, 2010 winner of the Gordon Pask award, talks about the collaborative nature of the agile community and how it has changed the nature of work in organisations large and small. She reflects on how the community has changed over the years and become more and more inclusive, and invites one and all to join the conversation and contribute to the changes happening in the workplace.
Brion Vibber discusses the challenges of working with user communities, social bottlenecks, the Wikipedia article deletion process, scalability of software vs communities, new approaches to scaling communities, ongoing challenges with MediaWiki community, using git to scale the code commit process, automated Wikipedia edit filtering, flagged protection pages, and remaining challenges to face.
Jay Parikh will discuss various aspects of the software and systems that make up the Ning platform. Ning powers over 500,000 social networks and is one of the fastest growing Internet sites. Ning is a platform that allows anyone to establish their own social network site. Jay discusses the constraints that must be satisfied by the platform, the architectural basics, the API, and the future.
Elisabeth talks about the current state of functional testing tools and the work being done by the Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools program and how it is influencing the direction of tools development in the testing space. She also describes the new community-based site for giving and getting professional recognition- Entaggle.
In this interview, recorded at QCon London, Patrick Curran talks to Charles Humble about the history of the JCP, and how it has changed since Oracle's acquisition of Sun. He also talks about the relationship between the OpenJDK project and the JCP, the role of the JCP in innovation, and the recent Apache and Hologic controversies.
