Stefan Koopmanschap's RSS

Traditionally, software release is considered to be a handshake between engineering and business where a release made by engineering is passed on to the external world by business. In an interesting article, Israel Gat suggested the reason to split the software release into 'internal' and 'external' release, for the benefit of both engineering and business. By Vikas Hazrati

Jesse Johnston and Denis Morozov created code2plan, an Agile software project management tool, as a beta Visual Studio add-in and released it for free. The tool also runs as a stand-alone application that can be used to track projects, iterations, user stories, features, tests, defects and builds. By Abel Avram

Spring AOP/AspectJ combination offers many choices, whether they are AOP system, syntax or weaving related options, and a clear understanding of all those choices is important to apply them pragmatically when using Aspects in enterprise applications. Ramnivas Laddad said just one kind of AOP won't fit all applications and choosing the right combination will help developers be successful with AOP. By Srini Penchikala

I'm back. After a long, hard-earned holiday. While I was away, I received this interesting video from Hamid Shojaee. The video is a whistle-stop tour of Scrum in under 10 minutes! For anyone curious to know about the basics of Scrum, it's a neat introduction in a very short time. I do, however, have a few comments to add...

* Although Hamid says the daily scrum is optional, it really is a great way to ensure the team and product owner (et al) get clear visibility of progress and issues. It also creates some peer pressure for team members to complete the tasks they commit to. Therefore I would suggest you would lose some important benefits if a team opts out of the daily stand-ups.

* When Hamid mentions estimating - the process of breaking features down into tasks for a Sprint and estimating the effort is called Sprint Planning in Scrum.

* I also think it would be worth a couple more minutes on the video to explain the Sprint Review and Retrospective. The Sprint Review creates an important impetus for the team to deliver on time and show what they've achieved at the end of each Sprint. And the Sprint Review makes continuous learning a built-in part of the process - a valuable feature of Scrum.

To find out more, see also:
10 Key Principles of Agile Software Development
How to Implement Scrum in 10 Easy Steps

Kelly.

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An long-standing question in the software development world is: what is the correct ratio of testers to developers? A recent thread on the Scrum Development list asked how agile impacts this ratio. The answer to the first question seems to be 'It depends'. The answer to the second question, according to Elisabeth Hendrickson, is that agile teams can do more testing, with fewer testers. By Chris Sims

In this article, Alois Reitbauer, a Performance Architect for dynaTrace Software, specifies several architectural anti-patterns which can downgrade an application’s performance. Knowing those anti-patterns and proactively designing the application to avoid them will keep away certain snags that can impact application’s performance. By Abel Avram

SSL-based security using X509 certificates from certain CA's opens a vulnerability to sites masquerading under a forged X509 certificate, even in a "secure" connection. This was demonstrated recently at the Chaos Conference in Berlin by spoofing a real certificate. By Charlie Martin

Sun has released a whitepaper that describes the architecture used to host the Sun Blogs web application including a description of the hardware, the configuration of the server software, as well as a number of usage metrics. By R.J. Lorimer

After several years of existence, SOA continues on without a full consensus opinion on what exactly SOA is. A recent presentation at Gartner AADI Summit by Yefim Natis started a never ending debate about relationships/differences between SOA and integration. By Boris Lublinsky

Matthieu Hug provides his views on Cloud Computing, focusing on BPM-as-a-Service. Cloud Computing is not just about making your problems someone else's problems, it also introduces key innovations in information system construction. In particular, it is poised to enable Multi-Enterprise Information Systems. By Jean-Jacques Dubray

Looking back at the year that is coming to its conclusion, we wanted to have a retrospective and find out which were the most read news and exclusive content items during 2008. We compiled a list containing top 5 news for each community and top 3 exclusive content items for each type: articles, interviews and presentations. This list considers the number of unique readers for each category. By Abel Avram

Meta Programming System (MPS), a new Language Oriented Programming tool from JetBrains, allows the developers to extend programming languages as well as create Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) for enterprise applications. JetBrains development team recently announced the release of beta version of MPS software. By Srini Penchikala

In this interview made by InfoQ’s Amr Elssamadisy during Agile 2008, Keith Braithwaite, an Agile developer, consultant and trainer, says that we should show a good deal of skepticism towards today’s Agile practice. By Abel Avram

In this original presentation from the Communitech Agile Event, Jeff Patton, winner of the Agile Alliance’s 2007 Gordon Pask Award, explains why one needs to embrace uncertainty in order to succeed with his/her Agile project and how to avoid some of the common mistakes leading to project failure. By Abel Avram

Christina Lau introduces IBM’s vision for BPM-as-a-Service: a light-weight BPMN based scripting engine for RESTful services. This vision is well in line with products currently on the market. The product is incubated at Project Zero and will eventually be deployed with WebSphere sMash. By Jean-Jacques Dubray

Sony's PS3 may be losing the market share war, but it has other uses. Does somebody want a supercomputer at home? That can be done by clustering PS3s running Linux. And the PS3s can still play Prince of Persia. By Charles Martin

Green computing is becoming more and more important every day. System architects need to take into account energy consumption and to find ways to reduce it through: system virtualization, server consolidation, smart unit positioning in data centers, and others. By Abel Avram

InfoQ's third annual QCon London conference is coming back March 11-13, just 3 months away! Last year's QCon London had over 450 registrants & 100 speakers. This year will beat the economic gloom, join us for another awesome networking and educational experience! By Floyd Marinescu