Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad field that spans academic research with ambitions to create an artificial human brain (general AI) through to practical applications of deep learning (DL), a branch of machine learning (ML, itself the part of AI concerned with learning systems built on data rather than prepared rules). DL has many real-world … continue reading
Open-source software is showing up in ever-growing percentages of applications, and the amount of open-source within those applications is increasing just as fast. Developers are drawn to open source for a number of reasons: the fact that they can access the code within the components; the fact that there is a community of people creating, … continue reading
Since my introduction into the software development industry in 1999, there has been one theme underlying all our coverage of tools, processes and methodologies: Getting business and IT to work closer together. At first, this divide was chalked up to the fact that the two sides did not speak the same language. The business side … continue reading
Lin wrote this article in May 2020 in refection of Istio’s third anniversary. On May 24, 2017, IBM and Google announced the launch of Istio, an open technology that enables developers to seamlessly connect, manage, and secure networks of different microservices—regardless of platform, source, or vendor. I’ve been working on Istio since its 0.1 release … continue reading
Since COVID-19 took hold as a global pandemic, we have seen a lot of focus in the United States on improving our healthcare supply chain, by eliminating barriers to coordination among the many parties needed to source, build, transport and sell pharmaceuticals and equipment that medical professionals need. There’s no simple fix available here. Supplier … continue reading
It was around late 2017 when we first reported on ‘value stream management‘ as it pertained to software development. By now, everyone knows that value stream concepts were first introduced on manufacturing floors, and were designed to eliminate waste (of effort and materials) and wait times (dependence on others to complete tasks before you could … continue reading
Agile IT practitioners must exhibit a range of digital business skills that go beyond the ability to code, such as courage, communication and leadership. Application technical professionals who exhibit this diverse and important skill set are what we like to call “Agile superheroes.” Some superheroes, like Superman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man and the Hulk, have superhuman … continue reading
Every business analyst has heard this at least once, if not often: “I don’t want to get too technical for this discussion.” But the fact of the matter is “it is getting technical.” With more organizations moving to the cloud and developing cloud-based solutions, terms of information technology that have been used in the software … continue reading
Over the years, we’ve written a lot about disaster planning and recovery, the need for backing up systems and business continuity. While many large organizations have their data in redundant locations — either their own data centers or cloud-provided regions around the world, smaller organizations have looked at disaster recovery in the same way they … continue reading
A few months ago, before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, the near-term future of the smartphone seemed obvious. We were moving to foldable devices with the only question being whether these devices would unfold to get to tablet size (Samsung) or fold down to fit better in your pocket (Samsung, Motorola). But with the collapse … continue reading
Service mesh is regularly pitched as the silver bullet for developing services, but in reality, it only addresses specific operations, security and traffic policies, not every possible aspect. As enterprises move away from monoliths to microservices and cloud-native applications, it’s vital to have secure and easy to implement integrations that free up developer time for … continue reading
The novel coronavirus pandemic has forced many of us to change our routines. Perhaps the biggest of these changes is the fact that now, many of us are working from home for the first time. In the software industry, remote work — or telework, as it’s sometimes called — is fairly common. But in magazine … continue reading
What is a cloud-native enterprise and how does an enterprise achieve that designation? A cloud-native enterprise is one that specializes in cloud-native development, or development that is optimized for distributed infrastructures. Examples of distributed infrastructures include hybrid clouds — on-premises applications that use products and services from a multitude of sources and applications that leverage … continue reading
Estimating the time and cost it takes to deliver a project is the bane of system development and it is an old problem that doesn’t seem to be getting any better. How bad? According to a 2012 McKinsey-Oxford University study of 5,400 large- scale IT projects, 66 percent were over budget, 33 percent came in … continue reading
