InfoQ Homepage News
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Feedback, Non-Feedback and Uncalled Feedback
The importance of feedback in Agile development is paramount. Feedback is built into every aspect of the methodology ranging from unit tests, continuous integration, daily standup, retrospectives to end of sprint demos. In-spite of all this, are there still some feedback loops which remain incomplete?
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Boost Website Performance with the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service
The newly-released Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service stores distributed data in-memory to improve performance on Windows Azure and SQL Azure. It’s highly scalable, will cache any type of data regardless of size, and is secured via the AppFabric Access Control Service.
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Representing Agile Testing
Several members of the Agile community describe different styles for expressing user story tests and the testing of an entire theme.
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Twilio's Cloud Architecture Principles
While many complained about the AWS outage impacting their business, Twilio explained, in a controversial post, why its Cloud Architecture Principles were key in not being or mildly affected by the AWS issues.
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OpenStack Discusses Cactus, Previews Diablo
The OpenStack project gathered late last week, and amidst the Amazon EBS debacle, held a Webinar to both elaborate on new features introduced in Cactus and describe anticipated elements of the upcoming Diablo release.
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Asynchronous Message Processing using Task Parallel Library and Reactive Extensions
A new preview of TPL Dataflow has recently been released along with Visual Studio Async. Along with performance enhancements and stronger ties with the Reactive Framework, it is being positioned as a foundation for building actor/agent style frameworks as opposed to a complete solution.
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Is there an Agile Personality Type?
There has been quite a bit of research in both academic and practitioner circles into the impact of personality types on agile teams. Various commentators have asked variations on the question “is there an agile personality type”. The most common answer seems to be “it depends”, but there seem to be some key characteristics that seem to indicate an affinity with agile methods
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Quartz 2.0 Supports Fluent Configuration API and Monitoring of Job Scheduling
The latest version of open source job scheduler Quartz supports fluent configuration API and monitoring and management of job scheduling actions. Terracotta recently announced the release of version 2.0 of the scheduler framework. The new version also offers two commercial modules - Quartz Manager and Quartz Where.
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Hudson Resurrected as Hudson 2.0
The first significant release of Hudson since the Hudson/Jenkins fork has been released, with a new versioning scheme following OSGi/Semantic Versioning going forward. This includes a new JSR330 dependency injection model to make it easier to run in an OSGi runtime as well as decoupling from specific Hudson annotations.
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Message Queuing Options for .NET
When building larger scale applications, message queues are often very helpful for both distributing and aggregating workloads. In the .NET ecosystem there are several options available for message queuing. This article highlights some of the more popular and unique offerings as well as the basic terminology needed to evaluate them.
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Software Engineer best rated Job in 2011
According to careertrack.com the best rated job in 2011 is Software Engineer, at least in the US. 200 professions across various industries, skill levels, and salaries have been surveyed to calculate the ranking which is determined by taking the work environment, physical demands, outlook, income and stress into account.
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Major Outage on Amazons EC2 US-East Datacenter - Many sites affected
Since April 21, 2011, 1:41 AM PDT Amazon's US-EAST EC2 Datacenter reported major outages (due to failing EBS volumes) affecting many sites like Reddit, Foursquare, Quora, Hootsuite and Heroku which rely on EC2 services. The article links to discussions about reliability of Availability Zones of EC2 datacenters and EC2 SLA's as well as desaster recovery and prevention.
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Steve Marx Explores Hidden Gems in Windows Azure
Steve Marx, Tactical Strategist at Windows Azure, gave a presentation at MIX11 on “10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Windows Azure”, highlighting a list of things that can be done with WA but may not be common knowledge. We got in touch with Steve to ask him more about AppFabric, Startup Tasks, Blob leasing and more -
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Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service 2.0 Supports New Identity Providers
At the recent MIX 2011 conference, Microsoft announced updates to its existing cloud-based Access Control Service (ACS) that supports new web-friendly and enterprise-grade identity providers, while beefing up its support for standard communication protocols, improving the developer experience and enhancing the online management portal.
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GitHub Passes 2m Repositories
GitHub recently announced they had passed two million git repositories hosted, with 70% being created in the last year alone and an expected 1m users later this year. What else is new at GitHub?