Global Project Management
Published November 28th, 2007 Under Software Development | Leave a Comment
The trend towards globalization well known in the software development world, because either we work with colleagues with a different cultural background or part of our projects are outsourced in another country. Using his experience in a large multinational company, Jean Binder has produced an excellent book on the topic of global project management: “Global Project Management: Communication, Collaboration and Management Across Borders“. To promote the framework describe in his book, Jean has also created a Web site globalprojectmanagement.org that presents the main aspects of the books. A forum allows project managers worldwide to share their concerns and solutions.
New Software Quality Assurance Portal
Published November 23rd, 2007 Under Software Development | Leave a Comment
The Software Quality Assurance Zone is a repository for resources concerning software testing (unit testing, functional testing, regression testing, load testing), code review and inspection, bug and defect tracking, continuous integration. The content consists of articles, news, press releases, quotations, books reviews and links to articles, Web sites, tools, blogs, conferences and other elements concerning software quality assurance. Feel free to contribute with your own articles, links or press releases.
Microsoft releases Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5
Published November 21st, 2007 Under News, Software Development | Leave a Comment
Microsoft today announced this week that Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 have released to manufacturing (RTM) and are now available for MSDN subscribers to download. The release of these products is another important milestone on the road to the Global Launch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on Feb. 27, 2008, and represents the latest in a series of innovations from Microsoft targeted at developers and development teams.
Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 are also core components of the Microsoft application platform, a set of integrated capabilities, tools and infrastructure that enables organizations to build more dynamic, connected applications and ultimately deliver better business value.
Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk
Published November 14th, 2007 Under Books, Software Development | Leave a Comment
As a software developer, you know that one of the critical period in a project is when you try to make integrate your code in the overall application and push it towards the final user. It is sometimes a long process that you would like to accelerate so that you could obtain a quicker feedback on the quality of your code. This book written by Paul Duvall, with Steve Matyas and Andrew Glover, will help you improve the way you build and deliver software.
After a initial presentation of the continuous integration (CI) concepts and objectives, the content of the book goes far beyond the simple “continuous build” aspect to cover all disciplines concerned by CI: risk management, configuration management, database evolution, software testing, inspections, deployment. It is clear that CI is just not installing a suite of tools, but is mainly changing software development practices and process. Each chapter is well structured with practical examples related to real life situations. The book reach also nicely the objective of maintaining a balance between a somewhat tools- and language-neutral position, but still giving enough practical advice so that you could quickly adapt the advice to your own software development environment. Final appendixes give valuable information on CI resources and evaluating available CI tools.
Finally, you can get more and updated information on continuous integration and download book’s chapter two from the Web site associated to the book: http://www.integratebutton.com
Click here to get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Click here to get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk
Microsoft Wants to Get Up the Software Development Food Chain
Published November 1st, 2007 Under News, Software Development | Leave a Comment
Microsoft recently announced at its fifth annual SOA & Business Process Conference a new vision and roadmap to simplify the effort required to design, build, deploy and manage composite applications. The code name for this project is “Oslo”. This new vision is loaded with all the current software development buzzwords like service-oriented architecture (SOA), business-process management (BPM) or model-driven development (MDD / MDA). In its press release Microsoft mentions that it “work to deliver a unified platform integrating services and modeling, moving from a world where models describe the application to a world where models are the application.”
This new roadmap is related to its Software Factory vision and is a clear strategy from Microsoft to extend the reach for its software development tools division. Currently, Microsoft is mainly considered as a programming tools (languages, databases) vendor. This new vision wants to implement a complete model-to-code environment. It is also a strategy to be present the Web services (SOA) space. The current initial trend to applications that mix content from different providers (also know as mash-up) has good chances to grow as companies will provide specialized services (mapping, computation engines, etc.) that will be integrated to the final solution for the end-user. Managing this new open architecture while guaranteeing security is a main challenge that will determine the expansion of Web services.
Even if nothing should be available before the end of next year (Visual Studio 10), this is clearly a menace for revenues of companies that are active in the application modeling area, moreover in the Microsoft eco-system like Borland or Sparx Systems. This initiative could be seen as a move from Microsoft to prevent its customers from buying product in these technologies (SOA, BPM, Workflow) from competitors like IBM, Oracle or BEA Systems. However, I think that this roadmap is mainly a bad news for smaller companies that wanted to provide independent solutions in the .NET world, even if we can remember many announces of ambitious architecture that have never materialized in working products.