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To satisfy the growing need for Business Process Management (BPM) and BPI knowledge, DNV Academy has developed a new four-day masterclass. In this masterclass, participants learn how to model and document business processes and how to apply improvement approaches such as Lean and Six Sigma. During the masterclass, participants will apply the theory using both predefined and ad-hoc patterns. Do you need to define and improve your business processes? Then follow the link and read on.

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

Have you ever been on a project where some person or group is holding up the works? They are called the “bottleneck” station, and here are some usual and unusual strategies for improving output in the presence of various bottlenecks.

In any project or organization, some person, group, or station inevitably acts as a bottleneck to the organization’s output. This is, of course, trivially true: Once the output of that station improves so it is not the bottleneck, some other station becomes the limiting factor.

For just that reason, I will not discuss in this article options about improving the performance at individual stations. I will, rather, discuss ways to improve total system results once you have tried all you can think of for the key stations. If you find a way to improve the performance at the bottleneck station, then you get to start all over, working out where the new bottleneck is and how to improve total system performance in the presence of that bottleneck.

Assuming, then, that you have done all you can to improve the output ability at the bottleneck station, it is sometimes possible to further improve output by putting attention on the non-bottleneck stations.

The odd part about these strategies is that when we use the spare capacity at the non-bottleneck stations, we will sometimes deliberately allow “rework” in order to gain an advantage at the bottleneck station. This is counterintuitive to most people: Most of our industry is founded on the notion that we should avoid rework like the plague.

I will refer to this as “spending” efficiency locally for a global gain.

Once you start looking for this, you will see people in ordinary life doing exactly that: Those who have a bit of spare time find ways to help the bottleneck group and streamline the overall flow. The way in which efficiency is best spent differs according to the situation. Taking a look at those alternatives is what this article is about.

Alistair Cockburn

http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2009/01/0901Cockburn.html

De bewering dat informatietechnologie de afgelopen vijftig jaar een onvoorstelbare ontwikkeling heeft doorgemaakt is bijna een cliché. Toch, wie in dit nummer over de geschiedenis van de IT in de afgelopen decennia leest, ontkomt er niet aan: in de digitale wereld gaat alles wel heel snel.

http://www.informatie.nl/artikelen/2008/12/

With more processors and no magic bullet solution for how to use them, knowing how to write multiprocessor code that doesn’t screw up your system is still a valuable skill. Chances are you won’t actually have to write multithreaded code. But if you do, some key principles will help you master this “black art.”

Bryan Cantrill and Jeff Bonwick

http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=554

OMG’s SoaML should be published next month as a UML profile

SoaML (Service oriented architecture Modeling Language), an OMG specification tailored for SOA development, is anticipated for release probably next month, an OMG official said on Wednesday.

Goals of SoaML are to support activities of service-modeling and design fit into a model-driven development approach, according to an OMG document filed earlier this year.

Paul Krill

http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/12/10/SOA_modeling_language_readied_1.html

The field of architecture in the digital world uses a plethora of terms to refer to different kinds of architects, and recognizes a confusing variety of competences that these architects are required to have. Different service providers use different terms for similar architects and even if they use the same term, they may mean something different. This makes it hard for customers to know what competences an architect can be expected to have.

This book combines competence profiles of the NGI Platform for IT Professionals, The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), as well as a number of Dutch IT service providers in a comprehensive framework. Using this framework, the book shows that notwithstanding a large variety in terminology, there is convergence towards a common set of competence pro. les. In other words, when looking beyond terminological differences by using the framework, one sees that organizations recognize similar types of architects, and that similar architects in different organizations have similar competence profiles. The framework presented in this book thus provides an instrument to position architecture services as offered by IT service providers and as used by their customers.

The framework and the competence profiles presented in this book are the main results of special interest group ‘Professionalisation’ of the Netherlands Architecture Forum for the Digital World (NAF). Members of this group, as well as students of the universities of Twente and Nijmegen have contributed to the research on which this book is based.

Roel Wieringa, Pascal van Eck, Claudia Steghuis, and Erik Proper

http://www.sdu.nl/catalogus/9789012580878

Architecture is omnipresent and natural. Every child applies it, and it will keep doing so as a grown-up. Both Salvador Dali and Vincent van Gogh were guided by functional and constructional principles. Examples of functional principles for them were to shock or to please. Examples of constructional principles were to use oil color or water color. Design principles are the operational shape of architecture. Conceptually, it is normative restriction of design freedom. The rationale for architecture is simply that our design freedom is always too large. The question then is: how are you going to use this freedom? Through the whole history of mankind, people have answered the question in much the same way; they use design freedom for expressing their individual or collective vision.

In this book, architecture is introduced and elaborated for the area of business and ICT (information and communication technology). Fortunately, there is a lot of talk about architecture in this area. Unfortunately, the original notion of architecture has degenerated into something like a blueprint or a global design. This degeneration process must be stopped, the sooner the better. Certainly, there is also a need for global understanding of complex systems, for abstraction from irrelevant details. However, for this goal we have the notion of system ontology. It provides the understanding of a system in a coherent, consistent, complete and concise way, fully abstracted from all implementation aspects.

The aim of the book is to make the notion of architecture crisp and clear and to show how one can bene. t from it in (re) designing and (re) engineering systems in the area of business and ICT, ranging from infrastructural networks to enterprises. Having a corporate strategy is good but having the means to make this strategy operational is better. That is what architecture can achieve: to build strategy into design.

This book is the final report of the xAF (Extensible Architecture Frameworks) working group of the NAF (Netherlands Architecture Forum).

Jan Dietz

http://www.sdu.nl/catalogus/9789012580861

Now that Python 3 final has been released I thought it would be a good time to mention that there’s a new book to go with it:

“Programming in Python 3:
A Complete Introduction to the Python Language”
ISBN 0137129297

I’ve been working on this for more than a year, testing the examples against every Python 3 alpha and beta, and against the final release (using Python’s unit test and doctest modules of course:).

The book has just gone into production and should be available in print at the end of this month in the U.S., and a month or two later elsewhere. The book’s web page has links to a draft of the introduction and to safari books online where you can read extracts.

The book is aimed at a wide audience, but assumes some programming experience (not necessarily Python, not necessarily object-oriented). It teaches solid procedural style programming, then builds on that to teach solid object-oriented programming, and then goes on to more advanced topics (e.g., including a nice way to create validated attributes by combining class decorators with descriptors). But even newcomers to Python 3 should be able to write useful (although small and basic) programs after reading chapter 1, and then go on to create larger and more sophisticated programs as they work through the chapters.

Mark Summerfield

http://www.qtrac.eu/py3book.html

Apple has lifted its NDA and developers are now free to talk about developing for the iPhone. In this first article of the “Inside the iPhone” series, you’ll get familiar with the SDK by building a simple application and get a preliminary taste of what it’s like to work with the mysterious Object-C.

Wei-Meng Lee

http://www.devx.com/wireless/Article/40130

On behalf of the Python development team and the Python community, I am happy to announce the release of Python 3.0 final.

Python 3.0 (a.k.a. “Python 3000″ or “Py3k”) represents a major milestone in Python’s history, and was nearly three years in the making. This is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases, while remaining true to BDFL Guido van Rossum’s vision. Some things you will notice include:

• Fixes to many old language warts
• Removal of long deprecated features and redundant syntax
• Improvements in, and a reorganization of, the standard library
• Changes to the details of how built-in objects like strings and dicts work
• …and many more new features

While these changes were made without concern for backward compatibility, Python 3.0 still remains very much “Pythonic”.

We are confident that Python 3.0 is of the same high quality as our previous releases, such as the recently announced Python 2.6. We will continue to support and develop both Python 3 and Python 2 for the foreseeable future, and you can safely choose either version (or both) to use in your projects. Which you choose depends on your own needs and the availability of third-party packages that you depend on. Some other things to consider:

• Python 3 has a single Unicode string type; there are no more 8-bit strings
• The C API has changed considerably in Python 3.0 and third-party extension modules you rely on may not yet be ported
• Tools are available in both Python 2.6 and 3.0 to help you migrate your code
• Python 2.6 is backward compatible with earlier Python 2.x releases

Barry Warsaw (Python 2.6/3.0 Release Manager)

http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.0/

When HTML first came out, browsers could have been called “Application Thin Clients”, if the buzzword had been in use at the time. The introduction of javascript made it possible to execute code on the client, and this turned browsers into something much more than just a “display” mechanism.

Before Javascript, Web application development was simple: everything was done server-side. The concept of MVC - Model View Controller - was easy: the HTML was generated, and that was the view. With Javascript being a full-blown programming language, the lines are being blurred between which code is responsible for the View, the Controller and even the Model. The resultant split of responsibility across client and server in wildly diverse programming languages is driving many developers to alternative technologies such as Flash, and causing headaches for those Web developers who remain.

The key components of the solution - to allow the developer to create MVC applications in a single programming language, where at least the “View” source is extracted and compiled to Javascript and HTML - actually exist and are used in production environments, thanks to Google Web Toolkit and Pyjamas. RubyJS is well on the way, too.

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton

http://advogato.org/article/993.html

As the name suggests, GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) present their features and functions visually. The human-computer interaction is heavily based on seeing things, looking for things and interacting with graphical UI elements. Color is a main characteristic of any visual scene, not only on computer screens, but in any situation where we see something. Because most of what we see and interact with in our everyday life is colored (as opposed to shades of white-gray-black), we are very familiar with colors – maybe so much that we don’t think about them a lot. On the other hand, it does bother us when we need to read a dark-gray label on a black button. So colors have the potential to boost or wreck the user experience. This article will introduce the concept of user experience and highlight some aspects of colors and color perception together with recommendations for UI design.

Tobias Komischke

http://www.infoq.com/articles/Colors-UI

Internationally respected for his innovative thinking on both human and technical issues, Weinberg is recognized as a pioneer of software testing, starting with Project Mercury in 1958. A highly influential author, lecturer, and consultant, he draws on experiences gained in all three roles, as well as from a long technical career as a software developer and researcher. Jerry has written on topics ranging from computer systems and programming to education, problem solving, and writing.

Jerry Weinberg is the author of The Psychology of Computer Programming and more than forty nonfiction books. His blend of wit, storytelling, and jaw-dropping insight has won him fans around the world.

Featuring tributes by Fiona Charles, Bob Glass, James Bach, Michael Bolton, Jean McLendon, Sherry Heinze, Sue Petersen, Esther Derby, Willem van den Ende, Judah Mogilensky, Naomi Karten, James Bullock, Tim Lister, Johanna Rothman, Jonathan Kohl, Dani Weinberg, and Bent Adsersen.

http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/gift.html

Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing’s growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics.

http://processing.org/

Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory will be available starting December 26. We are honored to be the first book in Mike Cohn’s Signature Series for Addison-Wesley.

You can pre-order now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders and other fine booksellers, or buy direct from informIt.com - the coupon code CRISPIN4460 will save you 35%.

This practical book is for testers who find themselves on an agile team, test and quality assurance managers in organizations transitioning to agile development, and agile teams learning how to approach testing. The book starts with an introduction to agile testing, how it’s different from testing on a traditional team, and what makes agile testers different. The book contains dozens of stories from real people on real agile teams about the various
testing-related issues they faced and how they resolved them. A section on organizational challenges covers cultural issues that agile testers face, team logistics, metrics, defect tracking and test planning. One central part of the book uses Brian Marick’s agile testing matrix to go through all the different types of testing needed on an agile project, who does it, how to approach each type, and what tools might help. The test automation portion of the book looks at barriers to successful test automation, ways to overcome them, and how to develop a sound test automation strategy. Another core section of the book takes the reader through an iteration, and more, in the life of an agile testing, from release planning to successful delivery.

In the book, we answer questions such as:

• As a tester, what is my role on an agile team?
• How do I transition from a traditional phased/gated development cycle to agile?
• How do we get testers engaged with the rest of the agile development team?
• What tools do I need?
• Who does what testing on an agile team?
• How can testing “keep up” with short iterations?
• How do we know if we’re doing a good job of testing? How can we improve?
• What do testers do the first few days of an iteration, before any stories are done?
• None of our testing is automated. Where do we start, and how do we find time to do automation?

This book teaches by example. It presents many testing challenges faced by real agile teams, including the authors’, and explains how those teams solved their problems. You’ll learn how apply different types of agile testing to your unique situation in order to guide development, learn about the product and apply that learning to the development and testing process.

Lisa Crispin

http://lisacrispin.blogspot.com