SE News

Our universities don’t teach people how to do source control. Our employers don’t teach people how to do source control. SCM tool vendors don’t teach people how to do source control. We need some materials that explain how source control is done. My goal for this series of articles is to create a comprehensive guide to help meet this need.

Eric Sink

http://software.ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html

Fed up with big analyst firms and IT vendors inventing divisive vocabulary and creating hype to further their own agendas?

Well, you’re not alone. Following an attempt by some of the bigger players to introduce yet another term into the already confused area of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), a group of analysts and SOA specialists, led by industry analyst firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton (MWD), have decided to make a stand.

Dale Vile

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/06/22/soa_madness/

The same thing happened with Windows XP. When Beta 2 arrived, I found myself torn between what was new and good about the operating system, and what was new and bad.

Significant negatives back in 2001 included product activation (which doesn’t affect Microsoft volume licensing customers), changes to the network-configuration user interface and the way XP interacted with other versions of Windows on small networks. Was Windows XP truly better than Windows 2000? It was a toss-up in many ways. In the end, I went with the improved app compatibility and user interface improvements of XP. But it wasn’t by much.

Well, Microsoft just upped the ante on internal conflict with the release of Vista Beta 2. It boils down to this: The software giant is favoring security and IT controls over end-user productivity. Don’t get me wrong, security and IT manageability are very good things. But some of the people actually using the Beta 2 Vista software describe their experience as akin to that of a rat caught in a maze.

Scot Finnie

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9000829

De Atlas van de elektronische overheid biedt informatie over de structuur - het landschap - van de elektronische overheid en vormt de basis voor de ontwikkeling van de Nederlandse e-overheid referentiearchitectuur. Hier wordt zowel de huidige als de beoogde samenhang tussen de verschillende benodigdheden voor het realiseren van de e-overheid ‘in kaart gebracht’. De Atlas is ontwikkeld voor bestuurders/ beleidsmakers en ICT-architecten van overheidsorganisaties en voor ieder ander die geïnteresseerd is in het e-overheid landschap.

http://www.e-overheid.nl/atlas/

At the 2004 Agile Development Conference, a number of project, product, and management experts started working together to answer the question “How would you extend the Manifesto for Agile Software Development to non-software products, project management, and management in general?” Their answer is a document called “The Declaration of Interdependence.”

Alistair Cockburn

http://www.stickyminds.com/BetterSoftware/magazine.asp?fn=cifea

For organizations of all sizes, security failures can have devastating consequences. But security is only one aspect of overall application reliability. Indeed, it is often possible to equate the cost of a security failure with a given level of downtime. Thus, overall assurance of an application — that is, its ability to perform as required and resist or recover from failure of any kind — is really the key issue that organizations need to consider.

Cliff Berg and Scott W. Ambler

http://www.ddj.com/188700785

IT architecture has matured significantly as an approach to successfully address typical IT problem domains. A relatively new subdiscipline in architecture that has gained significant prominence is the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA, frequently touted as the elixir to an enterprise’s problem of application inflexibility and high maintenance cost, is often considered as a recipe for a company to boost its IT return on investment (ROI). SOA is a key architectural style for approaching IT system design so that a company’s business goals align with IT, enabling them to build resilient IT systems to meet new and changing business requirements.

Tilak Mitra

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ar-soapit/

For more than a century, since the discovery of the 80-20 principle by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, scholars and practitioners alike have preached the merits of applying this principle in business. The popular thesis, as applied to software development, is that 80% of property X involves only 20% of property Y. For example, 80% of the defects are found in 20% of the code, or €œ80% of the value is found in 20% of the features.€ The implication of such results seems clear: Focus your efforts on the high-payoff. But the reality is less simple.

Unfortunately 80-20 rules are almost always retrospective: You can only confidently apply them after the system has been developed and you have collected data from your experiences. As Butler Lampson has written, it is normal for 80% of the time to be spent in 20% of the code, but a priori analysis or intuition usually can’t find the 20% with any certainty [Lampson 93]. Thus the real use of the 80-20 principle has been as a way to find out about all the opportunities you missed.

Rick Kazman

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/news-at-sei/columns/the_architect/architect.htm

Application-level quality of service (QoS) is the Achilles’ heel of services offered over the Internet. Given multitier services €(tm) complexity and the dynamic nature afforded by on-the-fly service composition, even planning an adequate initial service deployment is difficult. Once in operation, a burst of load can quickly swamp a service and its database, and services ™ ability to react is often inadequate. The articles in this special issue cover various aspects of this complex problem, while exposing the challenges we have yet to overcome. Although QoS covers performance (delay and capacity), dependability, security, and many other properties in principle, this special issue focuses on performance and, to a lesser extent, dependability.

http://dsonline.computer.org/portal/site/dsonline/menuitem.9ed3d9924aeb0dcd82ccc6716bbe36ec/index.jsp?&pName=dso_level1&path=dsonline/2006/06&file=w3gei.xml&xsl=article.xsl&

Among the numerous new technologies in Vista is the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, formerly codenamed Avalon). This article takes you on a whirlwind tour of WPF and shows how you can start preparing for Vista by developing applications today using the available SDK.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is the new graphics subsystem in Windows Vista that will enable developers to build applications that provide breakthrough user experiences. If you look at the applications in use today, they are either Windows applications or Web applications. While Windows applications offer immensely rich client functionality, deploying Windows applications requires considerable resources and makes maintenance a constant challenge. On the other hand, Web applications offers ease of deployment and maintenance, but do so at the expense of increased complexity in the development process (since the Web is stateless) as well as less-than-ideal platform integration.

Wei-Meng Lee

http://www.devx.com/codemag/Article/30442

Code reviews are a cost-efficient way to detect defects early and improve both the quality of your code and the skills of your team. Jupiter is an innovative Eclipse plug-in designed to make collaborative code reviews much easier.

http://www.devx.com/enterprise/Article/31658

ajaxWrite is a web-based word processor that can read and write Microsoft Word and other standard document formats. Anytime you need to open, read or write a word processor file, simply point your Firefox browser to www.ajaxwrite.com and in seconds a full-featured program will be available for you to open, edit, print and save.

ajaxWrite has been designed to look like Microsoft Word, making it easy for anyone to start using it without needing to learn a new program. ajaxWrite also handles all the popular document formats so it’s easy to share your files and collaborate with your co-workers and friends. Once finished with your document, you can easily save your work right to your hard drive. This keeps you organized and works in the same way that you’re already accustomed to.

ajaxWrite works from a Firefox web browser on any operating system and on any device, no matter where you are or what computer you’re using. And because the application itself lives on the web, we handle the updates automatically so that you don’t have to deal with costly upgrades or getting stuck with old versions.

http://www.ajaxlaunch.com/ajaxwrite/

Justin Gehtland, Ben Galbraith, and Dion Almaer bring us a valuable and enjoyable book describing Ajax. It is full of running examples, points out the major gotchas, and it’s a good read too! Recommended!

Ron Jeffries

http://xprogramming.com/xpmag/bookPragmaticAjax.htm

Software Process Improvement (SPI) wordt al een flink aantal jaren toegepast in Nederland. Met die ervaring zou je verwachten dat de software industrie volwassen is, met adequate processen en beheersbare productontwikkeling, gestuurd door kwantitatieve investeringsbeslissingen. Helaas is dat nog niet altijd het geval.

De 9e SPIder conferentie laat de stand van zaken van SPI in Nederland zien. Cases, visies en ervaringen uit de praktijk, met resultaten: kosten- en doorloop-tijdbesparing, proces- en productkwaliteit, betrouwbare software, klanttevredenheid, en sterkere strategische bedrijfspositie. Daarbij de laatste trends en technologieën zoals agile ontwikkeling, offshoring en out/nearsourcing, en Six Sigma. Op 3 oktober krijgt U in 1 dag een kompleet overzicht van SPI, en bruikbare informatie om SPI toe te passen voor uw organisatie!

Kosten: EUR 349,-. Voor meer informatie en aanmelden, zie:

http://www.spiderconferentie.nl

Aan de inzet van IT worden steeds vaker financiële eisen gesteld. Dat kunnen rendementseisen zijn, maar ook eisen aan de inzichtelijkheid van de kosten van de geleverde IT. Ook kunnen er vragen komen over de benodigde omvang van het budget voor ontwikkeling of voor beheer.

Deze nieuwe masterclass is bedoeld voor iedereen die met een financieel oog naar IT wil en moet kijken: of het nu gaat om het ontwikkelen of aankopen van software, het beoordelen van projecten of het inkopen dan wel leveren van IT services. Met bijdragen van o.a. Ton Tijdink (CIBIT), prof. Chris Verhoef (VU) en Ed Sprokholt (Nyenrode).

http://www.cibit.nl/site.nsf/page/opleiding_it_masterclass_it_en_finance_