It all starts with the passion to succeed… Becoming a good tester does not mean reaching a destination, but rather being on a constant journey into new territories. It is important to build the right skills that will provide us with the understanding of how to approach software testing. These skills help us build credibility and gain the respect of other professionals involved in software development. With a strong foundation of skills we have a better chance of succeeding in what we do: we will be able to provide better quality which leads to better products and in the end, to happier customers and users.

A few months ago, I participated in the Berlin Scrum Gathering organized by Scrum Alliance, where I discovered that there are many organizations which dedicate a lot of time to mentality change. They have adopted an agile mindset as an answer to a fast changing environment, with fast changing customer needs, in which a few lost moments can result in a lot of unnecessary work. When we talk about Agile, we talk about a mindset, about being able to react in time to change, about a group of methodologies based on incremental, iterative development and about close cooperation between team members with cross functional expertise.

Lately we all have been bombarded with everyone saying that we need to have continuous delivery and that we need to put the application quicker into production. And yes ...why not? Having the application put live into production ten times a day is cool. But then, why did it take us so much time? Continuous delivery was there from the very start of agile. It is in the first principle: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

The development and direction of the Romanian IT industry - Cluj Napoca in particular - has always been an attractive topic for me. I am the kind of person who always looks for the bigger picture; I try to understand the system or mechanism, how it “operates”, and then tweak it a bit. Just to get an idea in the 1900’s the average lifespan of a company was 80 years, in the 1950’s the average dropped to 50 years and in 2011 that reduced to a merely 8 years. This shows the increasing volatility of the global market and the fact that companies need to make adjustments very fast in order to survive the rapid changes in the environment they live in.

Generally speaking, you cannot separate projects from project management. It sounds like a 100% rational process but it is truly an art to handle the iron triangle of Quality, Time, and Cost. Generally speaking, you cannot separate projects from project management. It sounds like a 100% rational process but it is truly an art to handle the iron triangle of Quality, Time, and Cost.

The second edition of Cluj Innovation Days is scheduled to take place on March, 20th and 21st and is the main yearly event organized by Cluj IT Cluster. The President of the Cluster, Mr. Alexandru Tulai answered a few questions about the event, exclusively.

November 28, Cluj-Napoca, ISDC. Tom Gilb and his son, Kai, visited Cluj recently to share their evolutionary expertise in how to deliver value to stakeholders and create successful customer experiences through agile delivery. And, in return, make their own impressions of Romania and its IT talents, at first hand.

Habituation is a decrease in response to a repeated stimulus. Like our response to paychecks, repeated “I love you”-s, or bonus systems. Today’s magic wand is called gamification -behavior management-persuasive design-motivational design, you name it.

Looking at the last twenty years, we are confronted with what scientists call the Law of Accelerated Returns. Basically, technological transformation and innovation of these past twenty years represent the output of the previous two thousand years combined. Specifically, the tech industry has undergone fundamental shifts in the way software is built, delivered and, at last, experienced by ordinary Joe – the consumer. From batch jobs to applications running on PC’s and then web-based and mobile apps, such disruptions involve significant changes in hardware coupled with new kinds of applications.

The 2013 edition of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) took place in Mexico, Cancun – a rather exotic setting for us Europeans. Along with the pleasant location it is also worth mentioning that CEC is one of the biggest and most important conferences, its main topic being evolutionary computation – which gives the enthusiasts in the field of evolutionary computation, such as myself, at least two reasons to participate in this event.

In this article I would like to present an introduction in the Performance Testing planning, results collection and analysis based on my experience with Performance Testing. I am presenting this info taking into consideration that the reader has experience in Performance Testing I will refer to some metrics, Non-functional requirements that I have used as examples of some concepts.

Mobile security has become increasingly important in mobile application development due to sensitive information stored on our smartphones. All expectation and predictions of usage and projected usage are broken year after year because of the “flood” of smartphone users at the disadvantage of those using laptops or desktops. Who can blame them? The handheld device has become the “wallet” of the modern era, filled with personally identifiable information (photos, videos, notes) and private data (from healthcare, medical data to diaries, passes or coupons).

Even if many aspects of human evolution are controversial, one thing is unanimously accepted by anthropologists: We moved! (Brain Rules, John Medina; 2008). Over several hundred thousand years, from Homo Habilis to Homo Erectus and later Homo Sapiens, our brain developed by moving on distances of “about 10 to 20 km a day for men and about half that distance for women”, says the anthropologist Richard Wrangham.

The current article is mainly addressed to managers and executives and describes the approaches, factors and pre-requisites to be considered when implementing a measurements process in an organization. Ideas and recommendations outlined in the article are drawn from the experience and practices of an IT company whose focus is continuous improvement.

In an increasingly agile business environment, with an increasing number of companies competing for the same market share, the possibility of developing applications with many “out of the box” functionalities, Liferay framework is at least interesting. This article analyses the architectural problems that must be addressed at the beginning of the project in order to obtain a flexible product and to not to need major adjustments later on.

R.A.D. also known as Rapid Application Development is common sense nowadays when we’re speaking about development methodologies. Briefly, this methodology assumes gathering of functional and non-functional requirements through workshops or other means of fast communication, prototyping as well as re-using already implemented components. In order to successfully assume this technology regarding the time needed for application development, many companies use source code generation tools.

By definition, the flexibility – as quality attribute – represents the capacity of a system to be adapted for different environments and situations in order to face changes related to business environment policies and rules. Nowadays we can find this quality attribute in any type of business and this is why it is very probable present in the client’s requirements for their projects. In this article I will develop some ideas based on this issue – flexibility and its impact over the architecture and development processes.

There is no better way of describing the essence of the Agile Mentality than starting from the principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development „We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”
agilemanifesto.org