Outlook Series | DEVELOPER ARCHIVE

Integrated Test Environments

With as little as 29% of organizations using a test case management application, the use of test case management solutions is still in its infancy. Inefficient methods such as ad hoc testing, and paper-based systems can cost you. Moreover, manual processes and informal test case management can contribute to missed deadlines and cost overruns. Furthermore, your challenge may exacerbated by test case data and defects being scattered across multiple systems. This could result in you not being able to analyze test failures or having to compiling data manually. Developers have used change and defect management applications for years to improve quality and efficiency, but QA departments are just now moving to electronic tracking systems. We interview Paula Rome to gain Seapine Software's perspective on test case management and issue tracking. Paula is a Product Manager at Seapine Software. 42 Minutes

Automated Testing

Quality assurance engineers are being asked to take on more complex projects than ever before. Application complexity has increased to the point that formerly simple test plans now encompass hundreds, if not thousands, of test cases that must be executed under stringent deadlines. These demands have resulted in quality assurance teams seeking higher efficiencies than traditional manual testing provides. However, while automated testing is often hailed as a panacea it may not necessarily be appropriate for every project. So, it’s important to let hard numbers be your guide to this important decision.

We interview Tom Cohen to gain Seapine Software's perspective on automated testing.
Tom is a Sr. Product Manager with Seapine Software. 30 Minutes

EA Road Mapping

Road maps are essential for aligning business planning with your technology strategy. Furthermore, to drive agility, road mapping manages the time dimension so you can react to predictable and unpredictable events. Moreover, and particularly for complex organizations, road-mapping enhances governance and collaboration. While the manual construction of road maps can help, they are a costly maintenance headache at the end of the day. Fortunately, this exercise can and should be automated.
We interview Dr. Ulrich Kalex to gain alfabet's perspective on EA road mapping.

Ulrich is the VP of Product Line Management at alfabet. 40 Minutes

End to End Virtualization

The business case for virtualization is based in part on server consolidation. But, in spite of an impressive growth rate, server virtualization has yet to become main stream. However, virtualization can drive capacity utilization, cost reductions, increased security, improved reliability and accelerate your response to business imperatives. The real challenge is to navigate the virtualization stack to enable the selection of the right strategic vendor with the best solution set for you business. This challenge can be meet by leveraging a complete, end-to-end virtualization solution. We interview Simon Crosby to gain Citrix's perspective on end-to-end virtualization. Simon is the is the CTO of Citrix's Virtualization and Management Division. 40 Minutes

Mass Market SOA And Web 2.0 Apps

Rich Enterprise Applications arise from the convergence of two major trends in the development of Web applications. Those applications have become more complex, and any project that is targeting the goal of “retiring” an old outdated system often ends up, not only replacing the old functionality, but actually adding many new functions to the system. Furthermore, enterprise developers must serve two demanding groups of masters at the same time: consumers desiring all of the user interface aspects of Web 2.0 and businesses wanting more and more functionality.

We interview Fima Katz to gain insight into meeting the Web 2.0 challenge with a components-based approach.
Fima is the CEO of Exadel. 43 Minutes

Streamlined Development With SCM

Software change and configuration management tools support the structured approval, assignment, monitoring, execution and reporting of changes to software products for teams. For small teams, simple versioning and configuration might suffice.
However, if you involve more than a couple of dozen participants, SCCM products are needed. Furthermore, measurable, enforceable, and repeatable SCCM techniques are critical to delivering quality software products on time. Leverage the right solution and you will have complete control over the software change process, a clearer view of the state of files, and streamlined parallel development. We interview Jeff Amfahr to gain Seapine Software's perspective on software change and configuration management. Jeff is a Senior Product Manager at Seapine Software. 38 Minutes

EA Migrations

Enterprise Architecture Planning can help improve asset productivity and lower costs. Leveraging a SOA and web services framework is key to succeeding with that plan. The framework should help break bigger activities into manageable smaller ones that connect. Consequently, SOA and Web Services technologies can provide powerful tools and capabilities to effect migration towards an Enterprise Architecture (EA). We interview Lloyd Dugan to gain IES' perspective on EA migrations. Lloyd is Information Engineering Services' CTO. 50 Minutes

EA Governance

IT planners face a tough challenge when it comes to project tracking and investment management. Fail to meet this challenge, and you will have an ineffectual enterprise architecture, and a poor alignment between IT and your business strategy. Application backlogs, outsourcing and off shoring tasks, and new government regulations can exacerbate your planning challenge. However, the successful management of all aspects of your activity cycle will balance the proportions of your IT budget that support operations and innovation. We interview Dr. Ulrich Kalex to gain alfabet's perspective on enterprise architecture governance. Ulrich is the VP Product Line Management at alfabet. 45 Minutes

Greater Productivity With SOAtest

Comprehensive quality management practices and tools should be leveraged when producing or consuming web services. The distributed nature, widely varying loads, and Internet exposure of Web services drive the need for automated regression, stress and security testing. Furthermore, it is critical that discipline be carried out throughout the entire software development lifecycle.
Additionally, ensuring secure, reliable and compliant Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) requires testing through multiple layers of business applications.
We interview Wayne Ariola to gain insight into achieving greater productivity through reduced software defects.
Wayne is Vice President of Corporate Development at Parasoft. 42 Minutes

SOA Mediation

Every service needs to combine a set of artifacts. Furthermore, leveraging SOA Assemblies is instrumental in simplifying most common SOA applications. Indeed, integrators need to implement an architecture which supports multiple input and output transports and is payload agnostic. Being able to connect to whatever data source is required and handle diverse set of content formats will enhance your flexibility. Moreover, SOA Assemblies allow integrators to rapidly process messages from a variety of sources and to apply mediations like logging, transformation, validation and routing. We interview John Maughan to gain Cape Clear Software's perspective on SOA Mediation. John is Director of Engineering at Cape Clear Software. 42 Minutes

Collaborative Software Development

Distributed development organizations are often limited by conventional build and test processes that are not designed to provide the flexibility, optimization and processes to meet the operational challenges associated with building and testing software in highly distributed environments. To overcome this limitation, centralized LAN-based approaches are being displaced by a distributed Collaborative Development Environment (CDE) approach. The goal of a CDE is to unify project managers, developers, and business users within a single development environment accessible from anywhere in the world. We interview Nick Bonfiglio to gain COLLABNET's perspective on build and test governance capabilities. Nick is the VP of Worldwide Operations for CollabNet. 40 Minutes

ESB Driven On Demand Integration

More services are being made available via the Web. These are either provided by Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors or by traditional businesses providing new ways for their customers to access their services. Customers may be using multiple services in conjunction with their existing IT systems creating a need to synchronize data between them. As part of a Service Oriented Architecture, the provider may provide Web Service interfaces to its main business functions, thus enabling customers to automate their interactions with the provider. However, the service provider may not be able to isolate themselves from this integration task, particularly in a market where they compete for customers. We interview James Pasley to gain Cape Clear Software's perspective on ESB driven on demand integration. James is Cape Clear Software's CTO. 30 Minutes

Ajax Optimization

Ajax is emerging as the preferred development approach for web 2.0 applications. While the asynchronous nature of Ajax applications makes them fundamentally different from standard Web applications, Ajax applications are still built upon standard Web infrastructure. Moreover, Ajax behavior does not obviate the benefits of application acceleration. Indeed, this asynchronous behavior can make request switching and high-availability functionality more important to an Ajax application than to a standard Web application. We interview Prabakar Sundarrajan to gain Citrix Systems' perspective on optimizing Ajax applications. Prabakar Sundarrajan is the CTO of Citrix Systems’ Application Networking Group.
36 Minutes

The Journey to Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is a collection of concepts, and inventions that have yet to be adopted by the masses. Furthermore, the missing links of vocabulary and event processing are preventing current solutions around SOA and Business Intelligence from completely delivering on their promise of agility, customer retention and growth. SOA is the enablement platform for Web 3.0 and Semantics will play a key role in its functionality. We interview Sam Ceccola to gain BEA Systems' perspective on how Semantics is the glue binding Social Computing, Business Intelligence and SOA to create Web 3.0. Sam Ceccola is the Deputy CTO of BEA Systems.
60 Minutes

Globally Accessible ALM

Enterprises are realizing that their traditional software development tools and approaches can no longer deliver an end-to-end solution for application lifecycle management. In a geographically distributed environment, it has become essential for CIOs to set, measure, and improve their development processes and for project teams to understand and complete their specific development tasks in view of the overall lifecycle. To meet this challenge, enterprises need to bring their people, ideas, processes, and development partners together in one Collaborative Development Environment.
We interview Chris Clarke to gain insight into ALM. Chris is Director of Solution Architecture for COLLABNET. 44 Minutes

Better Decisions With BI Reporting

A sales meeting is in full swing, but it immediately stalls because none of the sales figures in the PowerPoint presentation match the data compiled by the sales managers. Then reports generated within HR show an alarming increase in the rate of turnover. But further investigation uncovers information indicating that retention is at an all-time high. Which set of data is right? These scenarios are real and occur every day in businesses around the world. So what can be done to get consistent, trusted data to the people who need it?
We interview Tim Lang to gain insight into how to make better decisions with embedded reporting.
Tim is is a vice president of developer programs for Business Objects. 49 Minutes

Java for Hard Real-Time Systems

Traditionally, resource-constrained and hard real-time applications have been developed with C and C++. However, as system and software complexity increase, C and C++ have driven up the cost of development with problematic behaviors. Java on the other hand, has already displaced C/C++ as the most popular programming approach for desktop, enterprise, and mobile applications. Previously, the use of Java for embedded applications has been limited to those applications with loose memory and timing constraints. Fortunately, new technology is now allowing Java developers to cross that bridge, addressing the entire range of embedded systems.

We interview Kelvin Nilsen to gain insight into Java for Hard Real-Time Systems. Kelvin is Aonix's CTO. 44 Minutes

Provisioning Composite Applications

In the coming months and years, composite applications will play a key role in the transition to a more dynamic business environment, and will allow organizations to deliver on the needs of service oriented architectures. However, the outdated provisioning processes developed around traditional mainframe and packaged applications is becoming an increasing liability, leaving IT Operations groups unable to cope with a more dynamic and demanding change and release environment.

We interview Annie Weinberger to gain insight into provisioning composite applications.
Annie is a Product Marketing Manager with Interwoven. 30 Minutes

SOA Implementation Best Practices

The concept of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) existed long before the current set of Web services standards. However, it is the widespread adoption of these standards that has enabled the idea of SOA to enter the mainstream, and to start delivering the level of connectivity and savings it has promised for so long. Now that SOA has hit the mainstream, some are attempting to show how SOA can be successfully implemented using pre-Web services technologies. However, these approaches fail to fulfill all aspects of SOA and become exercises in rediscovering why SOA depends on Web services technology.

We interview James Pasley to gain insight into SOA implementation best practices.
James is Cape Clear Software's CTO. 47 Minutes

Improving User Interaction With RIA s

While the web deployment model has reduce the cost of software deployment, it has also created a community of underserved business users that long for a return to the usability and responsiveness of desktop and client/server applications. Fortunately, forward-looking IT professionals are now turning their attention to design patterns and technologies that can improve the client side of the equation. As a result, we are now seeing widespread deployment of rich Internet applications (RIAs), which combines the responsiveness and interactivity of desktop applications with the broad reach and ease of distribution of the web.
We interview Duane Nickull to gain insight into web development with actionable blueprints. Duane is a Technical Evangelist with Adobe Systems 58 Minutes

T he Embedded Edge

The embedded computing supply chain is long and complex. It reaches from the smallest components up to the largest and most complex machines on the planet. At every point in this complex ecosystem are hundreds of companies, which manufacture components, assemble computer boards and integrate final systems. A failure by any one means the whole system breaks down. Consequently, the supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link. We interview Rob McKeel to gain insight into the complex environments that embedded systems serve.

Rob is a Vice President with GE Fanuc Embedded Systems. 30 Minutes

Ramping Up Packet Processing

Advances in semiconductor technology are making way for low-power multi-core processors. This transition enables embedded and communications applications to more broadly deploy systems with multiple execution cores due to the more favorable economic and thermal characteristics of this generation of processor technology. This transition to multi-core processors promises more than an increase in the number of execution cores to increase computation capability.

We interview Aaron Kunze to gain insight into how multi-core processors can significantly increase performance for packet processing applications.
Aaron is a Senior Engineer with Intel. 31 Minutes

Java Drives Mission Critical Apps

Today’s embedded systems are more demanding and varied than ever. With application areas as diverse as fleet telematics, industrial automation, civil avionics, and military field equipment and network infrastructure, project success depends upon equally diverse tools. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the need for efficient, dependable, and predictable software development - the kinds of benefits commonly associated with the Java development paradigm.
We interview Kelvin Nilsen to gain insight into the challenges facing today's mission critical developers.

Kelvin is Aonix's CTO. 30 Minutes

Bullet Proofing Web Services

Good web services design fosters SOA discipline which in turns yields business agility. However, there are numerous opportunities for things to go wrong with web services development. Even the slightest mistake can cause a propagated error that could adversely effect system reliability and security. Leveraging a systematic approach to error prevention is key to bullet proofing your web services and optimizing your SOA.
We interview Wayne Ariola to gain insight into SOA testing and business continuity planning.

Wayne is Vice President of Corporate Development at Parasoft. 33 Minutes

SOA With Blended Architectures

Service on demand and true service mobility have more meaning if they are anywhere, anytime, any network, and on any device. Seamless mobility can be achieved by enabling, augmenting, supplementing and supporting SOA with other architectures. Blending these architectures leads to a strategic benefit that goes well beyond just user mobility and device mobility. This blended approach does indeed deliver true service mobility.
We interview Rakesh Radhakrishnan to see how to achieve ROI through standards-based SOA software.

Rakesh is a lead IT architect in the communications market area of Sun's client services.
38 Minutes

Solving The Optimization Conundrum

Application software optimization is seldom a smooth and straight forward process. Software developers must often experiment with a range of techniques and configurations in order to wring performance out of their system. Fueling the complexity is advanced CPUs with multiple cores, large caches, and hardware prefetchers, making the software optimization process anything but simple and intuitive. We interview Craig Szydlowski to gain insight into how much software optimization is enough for multi-core processors.
Craig is a strategic marketing engineer for the infrastructure processor division at Intel.

36 Minutes

An Ebay For Web Services

As web services and SOA continues to gain traction in IT infrastructures, one trend continues to emerge. We are all users and producers of services. Moreover, SOA ROI is driven by web services reusability. Now, reusing a web service rather than designing a new one is the cost savings that drives SOA ROI. Consequently, a natural extension of SOA ROI, is an Ebay for web services.
We interview Bob Brauer to learn more about leveraging a web services marketplace.

Bob is the CEO of StrikeIron. 35 Minutes