Tasked with accelerating business innovation, technology leaders are swapping traditional IT project management for continuous delivery and iteration of software and services. But to succeed CIOs say such emerging models of IT deployment require strong collaboration with business stakeholders, as well as cross-training.
If your organization has adopted an agile methodology and you're frustrated by failure, it's time for a long, hard look in the mirror: Perhaps the problem isn't agile. The problem is your management style. How can you help teams succeed? First, you have to get out of their way, says Selena Delesie, founder and principal at Delesie Solutions, an agile coaching, consulting and training firm, in a workshop held at Agile Alliance 2015 last week in Washington, D.C.
In the current software development parlance, "agile" has become synonymous with innovation and speed. But many organizations limit their agile approaches to one or two siloed departments out of a mistaken belief that they're too big, too 'legacy,' too process-oriented to scale the approach across the larger business.
Release candidate testing takes too long.
When 80 percent of employees say mobile technology is critical for getting their job done, but the same number say they haven't asked their IT department for the apps they need because they don't think they'd get what they need, that's a sure sign of trouble.
The basic idea behind Dev and Ops is to get the two roles working together. This sounds obvious, but think for a moment about how the roles have traditionally been implemented. Operations is responsible for uptime and reliability; the simplest way to keep systems up and running is to lock ‘em down and prevent change. The job of a software developer is to create change. From the beginning, the incentives for one role are misaligned with the other. The first part of DevOps, the very inkling of an idea, is to break down the walls between the roles.
Google is expected to reveal details about Android Pay at its annual I/O conference this week, even as Samsung readies its own separate mobile payment service.
What began as an experiment in consumer electronics in the early 1990s celebrates its 20th anniversary as a staple of enterprise computing this week. Java has become a dominant platform, able to run wherever the Java Virtual Machine is supported, forging ahead despite the rise of rival languages and recent tribulations with security.
Last week I discussed design considerations for APIs, given that APIs aren't applications and shouldn't be treated as such. At small scales, APIs that come along for the ride with bulky Web frameworks might be fine, but beyond that you're asking for trouble. If you're building an API that will serve a large number of clients, your API code should be thin and tight, as well as make liberal use of caching. Otherwise, the future headaches will be crippling.
At the Strata big data conference yesterday, Microsoft let the world know its Azure Machine Learning offering was generally available to developers. This may come as a surprise. Microsoft? Isn't machine learning the province of Google or Facebook or innumerable hot startups?
Historians who reflect on JavaScript's emergence as a dominant programming language in the 21st century may find themselves quoting Donald Rumsfeld: "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might wish to have."
Language design makes a difference in software quality, and <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/2843393/application-development/functional-programming-tradeoffs-efficiency-learning-curve.html">functional languages</a> offer an edge when it comes to building quality software, a study of programming languages and code quality in GitHub reveals.
<a href="http://stackstorm.com/">StackStorm</a>, staffed by former members of GitHub, PuppetLabs, SwiftStack, Rackspace, and the Apache Libcloud team, has launched the first public version of its eponymous open source operations automation solution.
I'm sick of Java, as you probably are too. That said, there have been a number of changes to Java lately that may have flown under the radar. So, here is what you need to know about where things stand.
Faster innovation, better security, new markets -- the case for opening Swift might be more compelling than Apple will admit