Google has announced Certification of Agencies as part of the Google Developers Agency Program, which is an effort to work closely with development agencies all over the world.

The Agency Program provides agencies with training through local hangouts and events, content, support from developer relation teams, and early access to upcoming developer products, according to a Google Developers blog post. The Agency Program has launched certification for the partners that have undergone the required training, and they have demonstrated excellence in building Android applications using Google platforms, according to the blog.

The Agency Program has been launched in India, the U.K., Russia, Indonesia, the U.S. and Canada. The first set of certified agencies includes companies like CognitiveClouds, Readmadrobot, TechJini and others.

Rogue Wave enhances support for CentOS
Rogue Wave wants to increase its support for the open-source software package CentOS. Its new commitment will come with hotfixes and patches, which would help the CentOS community. Rogue Wave will also make it easy for its customers to deploy the CentOS images from Amazon Web Services Marketplace.

Rogue Wave’s OpenLogic Enhanced Support for CentOS provides patches and hotfixes, both of which are delivered within 72 hours. This allows development teams to continue working as quickly as possible. The patches and fixes will be submitted to the community for inclusion into the CentOS codebase.

Teams will also receive out-of-the-box hardened images, conforming to both the Center for Internet Security and OpenSCAP benchmark standards, as well as standard CentOS images through AWS marketplace, according to a company announcement.

Fast distributed tests for iOS
Square, a credit card processing company, announced its project called XCKnife is open source. XCKnife partitions XCTestCase tests to minimize total execution time.

XCKnife works by leveraging Xctool’s JSON stream reporter output for both historical timing information and for current test suite definition, according to a Square blog post. Xctool is an open-source tool created by Facebook designed to be a replacement for Apple’s Xcodebuild.

With XCKnife, Square said it saw 30% faster Continuous Integration test builds on its largest project. It generates a list of only arguments meant to be based on Xctool’s only test arguments. XCKnife also handles deleted tests and test targets. It is available both as an executable and as a Ruby gem.