Companies are obsessed with finding the next 10x engineer to join their team, but 1x engineers aren’t as enthusiastic about the idea. 10xers are like the startups valued at more than a billion dollars — they are unicorns. A rare breed. They are highly desired because of their ability to produce 10 times faster and … continue reading
Low-code app development platforms have been around for years, but for a long time, they were often looked down upon by developers as something not powerful enough to be used to create actual applications. Whether this was because of a fear of low code making their jobs obsolete or a true belief that these platforms … continue reading
Digital transformation is now vital to business survival, and an increasingly key element of digital transformation is real-time data. Digital integration hubs (DIHs), which are a type of Smart Data Hub, are increasingly being used as high-performance data access layers that provide real-time access to data from across the enterprise to power real-time business processes. … continue reading
Nichole Kelly, VP of growth, Windward Consulting Group IT leaders must focus on developing soft skills like compassion, empathy and emotional intelligence when managing teams in a remote infrastructure. Employees are dealing with a vast array of challenges related to the pandemic that require more flexibility and understanding from their leaders. Special considerations should be … continue reading
There’s a highly contested debate lingering throughout the software development community that, surprisingly, does not stem from the global pandemic — whether functionality or performance ranks priority one when talking about secure coding. In the rush to meet software development needs, there is a general acceptance that although “secure code perfection” is the goal, achieving … continue reading
Installing and configuring a fully integrated multi-software tool DevSecOps environment can be a long, tenuous burden for many organizations, often taking months from start to finish. Consider, instead, standardizing on a single application delivery platform — a set of integrated development, security, and operations tools — to increase productivity and accelerate installation and configuration of … continue reading
Two motivations drove the update to the Scrum Guide, which was delivered last month. The original creators of Scrum — Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland — described their goals: To provide better support for the growing number of teams using Scrum outside of Software Development. Scrum is being used by product teams working on problems … continue reading
There has been a resurgence of enterprise architecture practices, and Gartner wants to make sure enterprises get it right this time. According to the research firm, enterprise architecture previously didn’t provide any business value and “crashed and burned” in 2012 is because organizations were not looking at the bigger picture. “Despite best efforts, many EA … continue reading
Enterprise architecture (EA) is making a comeback. While the method for understanding and visualizing all of the business processes within an organization has been around for decades, recent changes and current trends in the industry is making organizations take a second look at how they do things. According to Saul Brand, senior director analyst at … continue reading
As we enter the fourth quarter of an explosively eventful year, important trends are emerging within the app testing industry – trends that will surely extend into 2021. The most important is the accelerated pace at which companies are moving to the cloud. The speed-up is being driven by the need to support remote teams … continue reading
I was recently hired to do an in-depth analysis of the software testing tool marketplace. By the way, there are more tools in the software testing space than a do-it yourself, home improvement warehouse. Given this opportunity to survey a broad set of software testing tool vendors, it was pretty interesting to look at the … continue reading
A key responsibility of my role is investigating how to create innovative solutions for existing or prospective customers. I am not unique in this endeavor. Organizations across all industries understand that innovation is the key to success, especially when it comes to markets that are seeing an ever-growing influx of digital challengers. Financial services is … continue reading
Low-code development has been around for many years and has experienced ebbs and flows in popularity, but has recently picked up steam again due to COVID-19. Businesses are looking to ramp up their digital transformation efforts — whether that means just starting an initiative or making significant changes or improvements to digital products already in … continue reading
As the Agile Manifesto approaches its 20th anniversary, it’s a good time to reflect on the technological revolution that followed. It sparked a milestone moment in the software development industry, outlining new values and principles that could be built on and carried forth in the pursuit of more effective, documented, data-driven development. The manifesto wasn’t … continue reading
Tim Jones, founder & CEO of app screenshot generator LaunchMatic, shared a story from when he served as growth product manager at Keepsafe Software. He and his team were struggling to create a holistic customer experience report that could be presented to the executive team. “We were receiving tens of thousands of support emails, app … continue reading
For many companies, digital transformation has been happening slowly over the years. But this year, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced companies to transform faster than before, or risk getting left behind. Brick-and-mortar stores needed to create digital storefronts, restaurants needed to invest more heavily into amping up their online ordering operations to support delivery and … continue reading
Did you ever stay up late watching infomercials on TV? Remember the salesman selling that stainless-steel turnip slicer-yogurt steamer, “And if you act now….” He must have been talking more than 200 words a minute. Three A.M., a crummy set behind him, a questionable item that might fall apart faster than its overnight delivery, and … continue reading
Recently, there’s been a new change proposal for Cassandra indexing that attempts to reduce the tradeoff between usability and stability: Making the WHERE clause much more interesting and useful for end-users. This new method is called Storage-Attached Indexing (SAI). It’s not the flashiest name, but what do you expect? Engineers aren’t known for naming things, … continue reading
In an ideal world, software testing is all about bringing vital information to light so our teams can deliver amazing products that grow the business (to paraphrase James Bach). Investigation and exploration lie at the heart of testing. The obsession with uncovering critical defects before they unfurl into business problems is what gets under our … continue reading
The adoption of value stream management platforms is especially needed in DevOps environments. According to Gartner, “Organizations lack end-to-end visibility into product delivery and struggle to improve their flow of value. I&O leaders, together with application leaders, must implement a DevOps value stream management platform and analyze value stream metrics to optimize the overall health … continue reading
There is a lot of talk these days about value stream management. Much of the hype is about getting the right VSM Platform. It’s about the tooling. I try to cut through the hype in my post “What Value Stream Management Isn’t.” In that post I make the point that value streams exist whether you … continue reading
I started collecting my thoughts on this topic at the start of 2020, a time just a short while and a whole era ago. Matters of heated discussion back then made way for whole other concerns, but as you know firsthand – more and more of our daily lives is getting online, ensuring that the … continue reading
Code reviews are a crucial component of the software development process. It encourages the software development team to interact with one another, collaborate, and improve the quality of their code. However, it’s more than just checking new code to detect errors and become familiar with the codebase. According to Phil Hughes, front-end engineer at GitLab, … continue reading
As technology advances and morphs, startups continue to emerge, looking to differentiate themselves from the rest against incredible odds — some 90% of all startups fail, according to Forbes. (That’s in all fields; not just tech startups.) Identifying which will ultimately succeed or fail is like trying to find gold in the bottom of a … continue reading
OpenAI says it is backlogged with a waitlist of prospective testers seeking to assess if the first private beta of its GPT-3 natural language programming (NLP) tool really can push the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI). Since making the GPT-3 beta available in June as an API to those who go through OpenAI’s vetting process, … continue reading
Navigating the digital-first world requires organizations to explore new frontiers to deliver more value to their customers. While the tech oligopoly can provide customers with digital solutions at warp speed, traditional enterprises need a little help. Many IT leaders, such as CIOs, are taking proactive measures to improve market response through software by adopting practices … continue reading
Imagine undergoing some serious surgery at your local hospital. The nurse tells you that they are all excited about your surgery. Your surgeon is very famous but quite new to the hospital and the surgical staff has never worked with him before, and they are not familiar with his operating room procedures. Further, there is … continue reading
When Compuware, now a BMC company, came under new leadership in 2014, the company embarked on a mission to realign as an Agile business. It went from delivering customer requirements every 12 to 18 months to a publicly faced quarterly roadmap deeply engaged with customers. Once the company started to see some success, customers went … continue reading
