With agile and DevOps becoming the new normal, mobile testing has become increasingly complex. The releases come at a rapid-fire pace, and the stakes for mistakes are high. Since the Internet of Things has moved forward, the complexity of devices has also increased. Now, smartphones need to communicate with appliances and televisions need to communicate … continue reading
The Apache Hadoop project took off in enterprises over a fairly short period of time. Four or five years ago, Hadoop was just becoming a “thing” for enterprise data processing and experimentation. MapReduce was at the heart of that thing, and Spark was still only a research project at the University of California at Berkeley. … continue reading
To paraphrase that great thinker, Ferris Bueller: “Technology moves pretty fast. It you don’t look around once in a while, you could miss it.” So, to get 2016 rolling, we’ve asked luminaries and thought leaders in the software development space to look around and tell us what they expect from the field this year. Kelly … continue reading
The smartphone reached eight years old in 2015, and looking at the app stores on iOS and Android, it’s becoming clear that these devices are replacing desktops. From Microsoft Office reaching both platforms, to Apple’s introduction of the professional-grade iPad, smart devices became first-class work citizens. And that’s not surprising, considering the trajectory of these … continue reading
Software security is improving, but this past year still saw hacks and security breaches. In 2015, companies were creating new tools or initiatives to make sure data and critical information were protected, but with a fair share of leaks and hacks, the wait for a solution to software security continues. Unlike other approaches to security, … continue reading
Application performance isn’t just about speed anymore; it’s about enabling high-quality user experiences that deliver tangible business value. Achieving that goal requires fast, easy access to more types of data than traditional APM solutions have provided. “You have to understand each and every transaction from the start of an action on the user interface all … continue reading
Much ink was spilled in 2015 about the Internet of Things. It’s a concept that has been bandied about for several years—remember the use case of your refrigerator letting your local grocer know when you’re out of milk? The coming together of smartphones, sensors, GPS, Bluetooth and other technologies that enable mobile interconnectivity has moved … continue reading
Software for cars has been increasing in complexity over the past few years. The amount of code in vehicles can reach a hundred million lines, and for the new and fast-rising self-driving vehicles, it could mean even more hundreds of million lines of code. These cars are not programmed in an “if-then” computer algorithm; instead, … continue reading
Agile has been a sought-after process for the majority of companies in the software development industry for many years, but 2015 appeared to be the year they all finally started to understand and see the benefits. “Agile is quickly becoming the de facto standard for software development, and five to 10 years from now it … continue reading
Could it be that the SOA revolution of 2005 was simply premature? After years of pain and suffering, it would appear that the Service-Oriented Architecture is, in fact, all the rage. What our modern SOA landscape looks like versus what it looked like in 2005, however, shows quite a land shift. Ten years ago, services … continue reading
Containers are spreading through the software industry like wildfire. Companies high and low are supporting Docker: Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle and VMware, and many other companies have added container support, compatibility, management capabilities, or at the very least are planning to release something this year. Why so much fuss over containers? They use fewer resources … continue reading
Before testers try out new methods that may expose software to many risks, their companies are asking themselves a big question: to test or not to test in production? As companies move to implement development processes such as DevOps or Continuous Integration and Delivery, testing in production can become an important piece of the equation. … continue reading
Technical debt is real, and teams need a strategy to manage it. Just about every software project accrues tech debt over time. Tech debt manifests itself during development and in production. Ignore it or don’t service it at your peril. Before continuing, let’s look at a simple definition of tech debt. The one I like … continue reading
The Internet of Things is all around us, and every day we’re soaking it in. It is giving the Internet senses for the first time, which will drive us to the future of business technology. Sensors are a huge part of the Internet of Things—and soon a big part of the Internet as a whole. … continue reading
As organizations seek faster time-to-market releases of the software necessary to stay ahead of the competition, new solutions that enable the business to create applications without the need for IT to get involved are starting to emerge. As with all things, of course, there are several angles from which to approach this need. Some platforms … continue reading
“By and large people have a handle on team-level agile,” said Lee Cunningham, director of enterprise agile at VersionOne. “The next frontier is really how do we take what works really well at the team level in terms of quality, in terms of throughput, in terms of the morale of the people; how do we … continue reading
Technology is advancing at a pace recently described as “frankly ridiculous” by IBM Fellow Jason McGee, who also is vice president and CTO of IBM’s Cloud Foundation Services. These advances affect how we get information, interact with our devices, make decisions, and even modify how we work. They also leave behind a long tail of … continue reading
The DevOps movement is gaining momentum, albeit at different speeds in different organizations. While the goal has been to streamline workflows between development and operations teams, there are a number of technological and cultural challenges companies have to address to optimize DevOps, and more importantly the entire software life cycle. If you’re confused about how … continue reading
When last we left IBM’s Watson, the cognitive computing platform was basking in the glow of its victory on the television quiz show “Jeopardy.” Showing off its mastery of trivia, Watson smoked the field of human contestants back in 2011. Since then, IBM has been building an ecosystem around Watson, working with entrepreneurs to develop … continue reading
It’s been almost 20 years since the term “enterprise Scrum” was coined, but despite the years of practice, organizations still don’t quite understand what it is or how to implement it. “There are a lot of users out there doing the technique, but unfortunately there is a large percentage that still doesn’t understand what it … continue reading
Regina Dugan, former director of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, paced the stage, about to unveil a dizzying array of technologies developed by her new employer, Google’s Advanced Technology and Project group (ATAP). But first, attendees at the 2015 Google I/O conference needed a little background. “We’ve been talking about wearables for two … continue reading
Microsoft has made many moves in 2015, with each step proving it is not the Microsoft of old. The company is embracing change, from open-sourcing parts of the .NET framework, to building applications for competing platforms—sometimes before their own platforms. This year we are getting a new version of Windows, both desktop and mobile, and … continue reading
Open-source software is becoming the backbone of the software development industry, helping to spur innovation, reduce time to market and lower costs. According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, almost every device or piece of software we use today contains some open-source code. “There are hundreds and thousands of products and services … continue reading
Phillip Ou had barely learned to code when he joined Make School’s 2014 summer academy. A year later, after transferring from MIT to become a member of the educational startup’s inaugural two-year “college replacement” class, Ou has published more than half a dozen iOS apps and is currently interning at Snapchat. Ou is one of … continue reading
Ted Dunning, the newly appointed vice president of the Apache Incubator, is a Big Data scientist in a world of coders. Currently the chief application architect at Hadoop distribution company MapR, the longtime Apache Software Foundation contributor and project mentor took over as the ASF’s vice president of incubation in April. Tasked with keeping Apache … continue reading
When a small team at Sun Microsystems set out to research the future of digital devices in 1990, they could never have guessed that their work would spawn the most popular programming language for enterprise systems. Twenty years later, and Java remains the workhorse of the enterprise, despite its origin as a language for embedded … continue reading
JavaScript is everywhere. Once relegated to an Internet fad, the malleable programming language has evolved along with the Web and now finds itself entrenched in modern browsers, complex Web applications, mobile development, server-side programming, and in emerging platforms like the Internet of Things. Underlying that browser-centric user and developer shift, JavaScript has developed a robust … continue reading
In most organizations today, the most precious assets (if not the most precious asset) are their applications (and the data they handle). Yet those same organizations protect their applications only from the outside. “Imagine a person who leaves his house always surrounded by bodyguards, because he cannot protect himself. He doesn’t have the skills or … continue reading