Third Annual State of Agile Survey Data Available
Published August 29th, 2008 Under Numbers | Leave a Comment
This survey was conducted and sponsored by VersionOne in June and July 2008. It received answers from 3061 participants in 80 countries; most of them (70%) were participating to the survey for the first time. The majority of the respondents were agile team leaders, coach or consultants. This could lead to a bias towards a perhaps slightly more optimistic vision of the reality of agile projects. Whether they are agile or not, managers stay managers ;o) Read more
Software Development Articles
Published August 28th, 2008 Under Methods & Tools, Software Development | Leave a Comment
Some of the last interesting additions to our directory
* Good Old Advice
Things have not changed in software engineering since the NATO 68 conference to the Agile manifesto
* Creating mashups on the Google App Engine using Eclipse
A series that give you insight of the the Google App architecture.
* User Story Estimation Techniques
A front line report on estimation techniques
Check out other recent discoveries
Open Source Software Turned Industrial but Perceived Quality Don’t Change
Published August 25th, 2008 Under Methods & Tools, News, Numbers, Software Development | 1 Comment
Open source development tools like MySQL, Eclipse, PHP or JBoss are now adopted by many software development organizations. Our last poll examined how the quality of open source tools is perceived against their commercial competitors. We conducted a similar poll twice in the past and it is interesting to compare the results.
| Open source versus commercial tools | 2008 | 2006 | 2004 |
| Same quality | 31% | 38% | 32% |
| There is no easy answer to this question | 25% | 22% | 24% |
| Superior in quality | 21% | 20% | 26% |
| Inferior in quality | 12% | 12% | 13% |
| I do not use open source tools | 6% | 6% | 4% |
| I do not use commercial tools | 3% | 2% | 1% |
| Participants | 913 | 524 | 312 |
Source: Methods & Tools
Ajax In Practice
Published August 18th, 2008 Under Books | Leave a Comment
This book by Dave Crane, Bear Bibeault and Jord Sonneveld aims to be of a second-generation Ajax book. It should go beyond just explaining the technology and explore in details the different client-side Ajax technologies and show what you can do with them. The target audience is a developer that has already a background of developing web applications and a basic knowledge of JavaScript. I can say that the book achieves its goals and provides practical concepts and code excerpts that can be readily used. For every topic that is discussed in the book, there is a detailed code example that shows how to use it in practice. I like also the fact that the specific goal of important lines are put in evidence in the code examples.
The book is divided in two parts. The first part contains four chapters that present the basic concepts of Ajax. After an introduction, it discusses the various communications techniques like Json or XML. A chapter is then dedicated to object-oriented JavaScript, that the authors present as a must to build scalable Ajax code. Finally, the book takes a closer look at the different JavaScript libraries (Prototype, Dojo and JQuery) used for Ajax applications.
The second part presents the various practices that could be used in client-side programming and are related to Ajax, either directly or indirectly: events, data entry and validation, navigation, drag-and-drop, usability, state management. Each topic is clearly explained in a dedicated chapter. A chapter is also dedicated to integrating outside API like Yahoo! or Google maps. A last chapter is dedicated to a sample mash-up application.
Source code and sample chapters for this book can be find on http://www.manning.com/crane2/
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk
Aspect-Oriented Modeling – what it is and what it’s good for
Published August 15th, 2008 Under Software Development, Videos | Leave a Comment
In software engineering, aspects are concerns that cut across multiple modules. They can lead to the common problems of concern tangling and scattering: concern tangling is where software concerns are not represented independently of each other; concern scattering is where a software concern is represented in multiple remote places in a software artifact. Although aspect-oriented programming is relatively well understood, aspect-oriented modeling (i.e., the representation of aspects during requirements engineering, architecture, design) is still rather immature. Read more
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