Ensuring Product Quality at Google

InfoQ: Ensuring Product Quality at Google

James Whittaker, a former Microsoft architect, author of several books in the “How to Break Software” series, and currently Director of Test Engineering at Google, has written a series of posts on how Google does testing. Google blends development with testing, having relatively few testers, and each product goes through successive channels before is ready for prime time.

The Top Five Challenges of Building Software Platforms in the Agile World

InfoQ: The Top Five Challenges of Building Software Platforms in the Agile World

During the past decade, agile software development has gained great momentum and found its way to an overwhelming number of organizations of different scales. Agile methods preach a raft of values and provide a wide range of practices that help reach and maintain such values. Although the initial focus of agile methods has usually been centered on the efficiency of the team as a unit of operation, recently there has been a movement towards scaling agile methods up to the enterprise level .Nonetheless, at the enterprise level, new concerns arise that may require revisiting some of the values and practices of agile software development. One of the major concerns is the issue of building software platforms as a strategy to achieve reuse at the enterprise level. In this article, I list the top five challenges that an agile organization should expect to face when deciding to adopt a software platform strategy.

Composite Software Construction

InfoQ: Composite Software Construction

In the recent years several composition technologies have emerged, at the presentation layer with mashups, at the process layer with WS-BEPL or at the information layer with EII (enterprise information integration). Though promising, these technologies remain marginally used as part of solution architecture.
Composite Software offers a new level of granularity when compared to SaaS (Software as a Service). Composite Software is about enabling "right-sourcing", i.e. move (or keep) arbitrary small or large elements of functionality wherever it is the most cost effective to operate them, not just entire systems. Economically, "right-sourcing" is far more efficient than "outsourcing" and SaaS.
Despite the tremendous benefits of composite software, the software industry is holding back the development of a composite programming model though major pieces of the model have been realized recently. The goal of this book is start by understanding today’s software construction processes and technologies and explore why and how it should be evolved to support core composition mechanisms.

Agile Does Not Guarantee Value Creation

InfoQ: Agile Does Not Guarantee Value Creation

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