SE News

On many application development teams, the ongoing choices, actions, and practices of team members can have a negative impact on code maintainability and hence overall code quality. Until these issues are discerned and tended to, they will become more and more costly, in terms of increasing the time required to perform changes and in ongoing developer resource cost. Further, risk of regression defects increases when code maintainability is compromised, because code that is not properly maintained is inherently more brittle.

This article underscores the importance of code maintainability for application owners and development teams, describes the future impacts of neglecting code maintainability problems, attempts to impart an appropriate sense of urgency for resolving such problems where they are found, and presents some proven solutions.

John Elm

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/edge/09/jun09/designdebteconomics/index.html

Too many projects? Want to organize them and evaluate them without getting buried under a mountain of statistics? This book will help you collect all your work, decide which projects you should do first, second — and never. You’ll see how to tie your work to your organization’s mission and show your board, your managers, and your staff what you can accomplish and when. You’ll get a better view of the work you have, and learn how to make those difficult decisions, ensuring that all your strength is focused where it needs to be.

Johanna Rothman

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/jrport/manage-your-project-portfolio

In the technology sector, there is a constant push to be the first to market with the next cool thing. Mobile devices are today’s new and exciting battleground. As with all things new, there is a lot of research and planning, platforms changing, and standards winning and losing the fight for survival. As a result, tools, techniques, and development languages are always evolving.

Working in the mobile software business, I have learned a few lessons that I would like to share to help you develop software for mobile devices. Some lessons I learned from others, but most are gleaned from personal experience. I don’t consider these ideas to be eternal truths, and neither should you. Take them for what they are–guidelines that will evolve as mobile technologies progress.

Luis Miguel Carvalho

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

The level of security effort invested in any application in your organization’s portfolio should be proportional to the amount of misery that will be experienced if that application is compromised.

Most organizations have a number of applications in their portfolios. Typically, the larger the organization, the bigger the portfolio. However, as one might expect, not all applications in the portfolio are equal. There could be a marquee application that is responsible for a significant chunk of the company’s revenue. There may be several smaller applications for supporting this main application. There could also be something like an application for perusing the company cafeteria menu - nice to have, but no one would really miss it if it were brought down. In short, the level of security assurance expected from the different applications in an organization’s portfolio can vary wildly.

Rudolph Araujo

http://www.softwaremag.com/L.cfm?Doc=1214-6/2009

The People Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is a tool that helps you successfully address the critical people issues in your organization. The People CMM employs the process maturity framework of the highly successful Capability Maturity Model for Software (SW-CMM) as a foundation for a model of best practices for managing and developing an organization’s workforce. The Software CMM has been used by software organizations around the world for guiding dramatic improvements in their ability to improve productivity and quality, reduce costs and time to market, and increase customer satisfaction. Based on the best current practices in fields such as human resources, knowledge management, and organizational development, the People CMM guides organizations in improving their processes for managing and developing their workforce.

Bill Curtis
Bill Hefley
Sally Miller

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/09.reports/09tr003.html

The social web provides businesses with a largely untapped marketing channel for products and services — the trick is knowing how to take advantage of it. With this book, you’ll understand how social web technologies work, and learn the most practical and effective ways to reach the people who frequent these websites. You’ll get intelligent advice and strategies — including what works and what doesn’t.

Tamar Weinberg

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596156817/#top

How do you know when the user interface is right? You test it to see if it works. Just as you need to debug code, you need to debug the UI. And, as with code, you’ll get the best results if you integrate usability testing into the development process early and oft en. Usability testing can be used early in a project to validate the navigational approach or to help you choose between alternatives. It should certainly be part of each agile iteration (this is called “formative testing”).

Charles B. Kreitzberg
Ambrose Little

http://msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/dd920305.aspx

For the IT profession to truly excel and flourish, IT professionals must understand how to present information in both technical and nontechnical terms. Editorial board member Wes Chou describes how to move beyond “geek think” and truly excel at serving the overall organization, from users to customers.

Wes Chou

http://www2.computer.org/plugins/dl/pdf/mags/it/2009/03/mit2009030004.pdf

Specialist certification is still a somewhat vague concept in the IT world. Some see it as proof of participation in a training program, whereas others believe it demonstrates that an IT professional has certain proven qualities and experiences. The value assigned to any given certificate can vary widely depending on the granting organization’s credentials, and the reasons people seek certification can be just as varied. Many workers obtain certificates for self-development or career-improvement reasons, whereas others are obliged by their employers to qualify for certification to work on certain projects. On both ends of the employer–employee spectrum, substantial ambiguity remains in the case for and against certification. Is it just marketing hype, or does certification fit with the constantly evolving professionalization and industrialization of IT?

Gerard Coes
Karel Schotanus

http://www2.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/0709/rW_IT_CertificationWhoDares.pdf

HTML 5 is an interesting beastie. The specification was not planned; The W3C was committed to HTML 4.1 as the last word in HTML. As such, most of the requests for HTML 5 came from the HTML user community itself, largely through the advent of the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). The push from WHATWG was strong enough to prompt the formation of a HTML 5 working group a couple of years ago. Since then, the HTML 5 working group has slowly gone through the process of taking a somewhat hand-waving specification and recasting it in W3C terms, along with all the politics that the process entails.

On April 23, 2009, the HTML 5 group released the most recent draft of the specification. Overall, it represents a considerable simplification from the previous release, especially as a number of initially proposed changes to the specification have been scaled back. The group defined roles for the proposed changes elsewhere.

HTML 5 is a broad specification, and consequently, dozens of distinct changes—more than a single article can reasonably cover in any detail—occurred between HTML 4 and 5. This article focuses on the HTML 5 layout elements.

Kurt Cagle

http://www.devx.com/webdev/Article/42280

Relational database management systems (DBMSs) have been remarkably successful in capturing the DBMS marketplace. To a first approximation they are “the only game in town,” and the major vendors (IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft) enjoy an overwhelming market share. They are selling “one size fits all”; i.e., a single relational engine appropriate for all DBMS needs. Moreover, the code line from all of the major vendors is quite elderly, in all cases dating from the 1980s. Hence, the major vendors sell software that is a quarter century old, and has been extended and morphed to meet today’s needs. In my opinion, these legacy systems are at the end of their useful life. They deserve to be sent to the “home for tired software.”

Michael Stonebraker

http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/32212-the-end-of-a-dbms-era-might-be-upon-us/fulltext

When adding new features that dramatically change how users interact with your site, it is a good practice to determine up front if your service can handle these new kinds of interactions so you don’t end up constantly disabling features due to the high load they incur on your site.

Dare Obasanjo

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/06/19/DarkLaunches…

Het vertalen van businessdoelstellingen in IT-oplossingen is op zichzelf al geen kleinigheid. Nog ingewikkelder wordt het als beide blijven variëren. De business van morgen is anders dan die van nu en dat geldt voor IT evenzeer. Dat maakt dit vraagstuk ongekend complex.

http://www.informatie.nl/