Scrum, the most popular Agile framework, is based on three very simple ideas: empiricism, self-organization / empowered teams, and a focus on improvement. These ideas enable a team, team of teams, or an organization to respond to their environment and deliver great products. Those three ideas are ultimately dependent on transparency. Transparency is easy to … continue reading
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is releasing a Top 10 interpretation for web application security risks in serverless. Serverless has been gaining a lot of attention as of late because of its ability to eliminate operations and improve speed, costs, and scalability for businesses. However, serverless is a new paradigm and with it … continue reading
In today’s fast-moving world, DevOps teams are struggling to solve the same problem: What is the best way to build, deploy, and maintain applications in a cloud-native world? From this problem has spawned a heated debate between the serverless and container communities. While I usually am a firm believer that the answer is somewhere in … continue reading
Agile has been around for nearly two decades now, and just like most things in life that we come to accept, it is starting to be taken for granted. It seems that somewhere along the way, the Agile approach has lost its mojo. “A lot of teams have been going through the motions and keeping … continue reading
The year 2019 will bring new approaches to increase software development productivity and better align development teams and organizations, according to a recent report by research firm Forrester. Among the new approaches are cloud native, value stream management and artificial intelligence-based tools. “New platforms for cloud-native app architectures, value stream management tools, and infusing artificial … continue reading
Application security threats continue to increase in sophistication and number as the technologies that enable them do as well. There have been reports of a 12 percent increase in banking trojans. Twenty-three percent increase in spyware. Twenty-two percent increase in botnets and other crypto mining malicious apps. While there are tools and technologies available to … continue reading
The Internet of Things is dead. Or so declared one of my colleagues recently. While I could dismiss the comment as flippant, it does point to an underlying cynicism of technology that has been nicely captured by Gartner’s eponymous Hype Cycle. As technologists we often focus on cool technologies themselves, and then get frustrated, or … continue reading
Project manager Adam sends his boss a status update for the weekly project status report. Adam’s project is delayed due to conflicting priorities with other projects, so he marks the schedule portion of the report red — an accurate reflection due to a missed milestone. Because of the delay, there will likely be a budget … continue reading
As many as four out of five companies leveraging a DevOps approach to software engineering do so without integrating the necessary information security controls, underscoring the urgency with which companies should be evaluating “Rugged” DevOps (also known as “shift left”) to build security into their development life cycle as early as possible. Rugged DevOps represents … continue reading
Data can be viewed to be as valuable in the digital business world as oil is to the economy. Oil fuels homes, cars, railroads, and even electricity. Data powers the business and revenue. Businesses that want to continue to evolve, transform and improve need are being fueled by their data to tell them where and … continue reading
As the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) winds down its work standardizing the Extensible Markup Language (XML), it is looking back at the history that brought XML to its success today. “W3C XML, the Extensible Markup Language, is one of the world’s most widely-used formats for representing and exchanging information. The final XML stack is … continue reading
Smart homes. Smart cities. Smart factories. Intelligent cloud. Intelligent edge. While many still believe the Internet of Things has a way to go before we see widespread adoption, there is no questioning that it is here today. Some things are prototypes upon which larger deployments can be built, and some are already in wide use, … continue reading
Clean code — a term first coined by Robert C. Martin in his book ‘Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile craftmanship’ — is very relevant in today’s fast-paced, highly complex software development and lifecycle management environments. It makes it easier to evolve or maintain a finished product. Compare it, if you will, to the work … continue reading
Java 11, which will be released this month, is the second and final major release of Java this year, following Oracle’s new schedule of putting out a major release every six months. According to the company, one of the goals of this new release schedule was to be able to deliver new features faster. Oracle … continue reading
One of the hottest questions these days, whether online or in the boardroom, is “How does the organization become more ‘agile’?” As the discussion evolves, it leads to, “How do we scale agility from one team to multiple, or should we?” Scrum being the most common agile way that teams work leads to the question … continue reading
Static code analysis is usually thought of in terms of preventing vulnerabilities from existing in code. And, it’s thought of in terms of things like memory leaks and tainted data. But as businesses become more reliant than ever on software to drive their revenues, it is important to think about the damage these vulnerabilities can … continue reading
If you’re not doing static code analysis (aka static analysis), now is the time to start. Delivering code faster has dubious value if the quality degrades as development cycles shrink. On the other hand, if you’re not doing static code analysis, you’re not alone. Despite the mature age of the tool category, not a lot … continue reading
While the first thing that might come to mind when picturing the near-future applications of augmented reality are snazzier Snapchat filters, for major players in AR development, it has serious potential in business environments, with a definite roadmap, and the use cases have already been illustrated. Hardware manufacturer Stanley Black & Decker, for instance, has … continue reading
“Why is open source important? That’s like asking why is gravity important,” stated Brian Behlendorf, a leading figure in the open-source software movement, and executive director for the blockchain consortium Hyperledger. While this year marks the 20th anniversary of open source, it is hard to imagine a time before open-source software. Today, it’s difficult to … continue reading
Microsoft has divided the process of moving on-premises workloads and applications to the cloud into three key steps: Assess, migrate and optimize. Once the assessment of existing infrastructure, applications and dependencies is complete, there are four general options for undergoing an application migration to Azure. Those are: re-hosting or lift and shift, refactoring with containers, … continue reading
One of the first things cloud architect Bill Zack did after moving from Connecticut to Nashville in 2013 was to form a Microsoft Azure User Group. Launched with just four initial members, the Nashville Azure User Group has a membership well above 800 and growing. “It’s been exploding,” Zack says of the user group in … continue reading
Practical adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is driven by an exclusive club of companies. A report from McKinsey Global Institute, published in June 2017, ascertained that investment in AI is dominated by digital giants such as Google and Baidu. On the other hand, the vast majority of firms have not taken any practical steps at … continue reading
It is no longer a question of “should I build a mobile app?” Digital businesses have begun to realize mobile app development is necessary to not only stay competitive, but to achieve customer satisfaction. Customers are accessing information on a huge variety of devices, and have come to expect a high-quality, mobile-friendly user experience. “Consumers, … continue reading
Breaking down a series of interdependent movements into discrete actions is often the first step to improving the performance of everything from professional orchestras to sports teams. And so it is with software. The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) evolved out of an effort in the late 1960s to put formal quality processes in place … continue reading
Web and mobile development focuses on technological inclusiveness, such as across operating systems, browsers and devices. Yet, as organizations become even more digital over time, human accessibility still isn’t getting the attention it should because there’s a general lack of awareness about the issue and how best to address it. Capital One began its journey … continue reading
Industry efforts toward distributed tracing have been evolving for decades, and one of the latest initiatives in this arena is OpenTracing, an open distributed standard for apps and OSS packages. APMs like LightStep and Datadog are eagerly pushing forward the emerging specification, as are customer organizations like HomeAway, PayPal and Pinterest, while some other industry … continue reading
No two managers are alike. Styles differ, their approaches to their roles differ, and face it – their levels of energy differ. But how important is it for managers overseeing software development to get down in the weeds with their teams, or should they remain above the fray, enforcing coding practices and setting policies? We … continue reading
At this point, the concept of DevOps should be familiar to everyone. But with the rise of cybersecurity attacks, organizations have seen the need to incorporate security into the mix. Thus, the idea of DevSecOps. Though the concept and practices were created with the best intentions, the number of cybersecurity attacks continues to rise, which … continue reading
