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Unique Software Degree Program Restarted
A unique university program of education in software and systems design has been restarted at New Mexico Highlands University. The program is based on experiential learning, features apprenticeships, and uses a radically restructured and accelerated curriculum. The program goal: "to produce a community of professionals capable of solving complex, "wicked," problems with computing technology.
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Slowdown in Virtualization
A 2010 survey suggests that companies have slowed their efforts to virtualize their data centers. The survey was conducted by InformationWeek and is the second in an annual series. The key finding: almost 20% fewer companies expect to have 25-49% of their servers virtualized by 2011 and almost 10% fewer companies expect to virtualize 50-74% of their servers.
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Interview with Ken Schwaber, Part1
Ken Schwaber is the co-creator of Scrum with Jeff Sutherland. He is a signatory of the Agile Manifesto, a founder of the Agile Alliance, and responsible for founding the Scrum Alliance and creating the Certified Scrum Master program. Ken speaks candidly in this interview series.
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Should an Enterprise Architect Have an MBA?
Todd Biske, an Enterprise Architect and SOA author, started a discussion on Twitter by asking the question “Should Enterprise Architects have/get an MBA?” Some of the enterprise architects who responded to the question believe that an MBA is not mandatory but it can be very helpful.
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Should the Best Scrum Team Be Rewarded?
Should one provide a reward to the single best team in a division each quarter? How is that team to be determined? What effects will that reward have?
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How To Do Large Scale Refactoring
Refactoring by definition means changing the internal structure of a program without modifying its external functional behavior. This is mostly done to improve the non-functional attributes of the program thus leading to improved code quality. However, refactoring on a large scale often gives jitters to even seasoned Agilists. The community discussed a few ways of handling the scale.
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Developer Survey: Challenges and New Technologies
Embarcadero has released the results of a survey of 600 professional developers conducted in May-June of 2010. The survey focused on identifying the "top developer trends, challenges, key initiatives, and current tools being used. The survey respondents were primarily application developers with the size of the respondents companies primarily from organizations with less that 25 people."
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Has OpenSolaris Reached the End of the Road?
An internal unofficial Oracle memo has outlined a new policy regarding the OpenSolaris operating system. Some consider this as the death of OpenSolaris, but others point to the opportunity for the project to be carried on by Illumos, an open source organization that wants a completely open OpenSolaris, providing the code that is currently closed and not depending on Oracle.
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The 2010 State of Agile Development Survey
For the last 4 years VersionOne has surveyed the agile community to provide insight into the “State of Agile Development”. At the Agile 2010 conference this year the 5th annual survey was kicked off. The survey attempts to "gauge the value of Agile Development practices", such as the methodology adoption. You can participate in the survey at AgileDevSurvey.com.
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Automatic Resource Management in Java
Part of Project Coin is the ability to deal with Automatic Resource Management, or simply ARM. The purpose is to make it easier to work with external resources which need to be disposed or closed in case of errors or successful completion of a code block. An initial implementation is now available in OpenJDK.
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Agile 2010: Where Were the Programmer-Focused Sessions?
The Agile 2010 conference was held in Orlando from 9-14 August. A number of commentators felt there were not enough sessions focused on the technical practices and programming techniques, including Bob Martin who twittered about the lack of technical sessions. This resulted in a number of responses and the announcement of plans to launch an XP Universe conference in 2011 targeting programmers.
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QConSF Nov 3-5 Coming Up: Highlights and Most Popular Sessions, Join us!
The QConSF schedule is developing fast with over half the schedule posted! QCon will be held Nov 3-5th at the Westin Market Street in San Francisco; QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for team leads, architects and project management. Registration is $1,595 (a $500 savings) until August 27th.
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Top Agile Books
Motivated by the flavor of Agile 2010 conference at Orlando, Jurgen Appelo compiled a list of Top 100 Agile books which should help the software development community.
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Agile 2010 - Industry Analyst Roundtable
On Tuesday afternoon the conference hosted an Industry Analyst round table to hear their take on the current state of Agile and where the industry is headed in the future. Jim Newkirk, chair of the Agile 2010 conference, led the questioning by asking the panel to introduce themselves and then to comment on the Top three things an organisation needs to do to ensure success in an Agile rollout.
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Agile Training in the new Gift Economy
An Agile trainer in the Boston area is offering free training in Test Driven Development. Dubbed Pay-What-You-Can, the training is a free gift, unless and until you decide to pay for it. Even when you decide to pay, the amount you pay is something you determine. Welcome to the new gift economy.