The online magazine from Cluj, Today Software Magazine, organizes on December 5th-6th, 2013, at Cluj Arena, the IT Days event. To the conference, we have invited international speakers as well as representatives of the local software industry. On the first day, we will approach subjects such as innovation and technology in IT, and on the second day, the main topic will be entrepreneurship.

Bucharest, November 25 2013 – Last week Bucharest hosted the fourth edition of How to Web, the most important web and technology event in South Eastern Europe. Developed around the „Let’s grow together” central concept, How to Web 2013 brought more than 40 international speakers from 4 continents in front of an audience of over 800 persons. Startup Spotlight, competition and orientation program for the best 32 startups in the region, was organized during How to Web.

In 1999 the principles of „Extreme Programming” came out and four years later Kent Beck reformulated those concepts into the more popular Test Driven Development. In the same period, in his efforts to spread the principles of TDD, Dan North was frequently hitting the same questions: „At what stage to start writing code?” „What should be tested exactly?” and „What is the structure of the tests and how to call them?”. Then he had the inspiration to propose the idea of behavioral testing or functional testing and thus Behaviour Driven Development was born - a paradigm that aims testing from the user perspective, meaning how he expects the application to run. Going further from concept to implementation in different languages was only another small step.

Authentication is the process of identifying a user that wants to access a protected resource. We use authentication in our everyday lives: ID cards, user names and passwords, security cards, etc. The process that comes next is called ‘Authorization’ and they are very strongly related and sometimes mistaken one for another. With ‘Authorization’, we can check for user rights and see if they have or not access to a specific resource after they have been authenticated. However, make no mistake; there could be no ‘Authorization’ without ‘Authentication’. In this article we will discuss about the process of identifying ‘who this user is’ using AngularJS.

Executable specifications are a way of using automated tests with the purpose of documenting the functionalities of an application. Automated tests are more and more used in the software industry, with the purpose of validating the correct functioning of an application. The validation implies of course a dialogue with the persons who formulate the requests (business analysts, product owners, product managers and other stakeholders) and the automated tests do not relieve us from documenting the ways the application is used. For documenting the functionalities there are some solutions, the most common one being writing specification documents.

Informatics and Computer Science academic programs in Romania often include courses like software engineering, software analysis and design, and project management. Despite the initial attractive appearance of these courses, students frequently become slightly disappointed in the end, or at least compared to other courses (e.g. programming languages, hardware, even physics, mathematics), the lectures are seen less interesting or useful. In reality, it’s not about the intrinsic lack that students have about these topics.

Adopting an agile approach for managing software projects is a journey, they say. This is the story of our team’s journey so far. Being a case study, it is neither an introduction to Scrum, nor a collection of best practices. Instead, I’m going to share with you the way we are applying Scrum.

A good teacher once told me: “If you need to do something more than twice, do something which will do it for you!” At first, I wasn’t at all convinced about the truth of his statement, but going through a few years of Computer Science, I started seeing it that way. The truth is that we, „the humans”, are truly bad at doing repetitive tasks. And so it should be – let’s let technology take care of that for us so we can enjoy the things which really matter.

In October 2011, we started the HackaServer Project, a web security testing platform using the power of crowd sourcing. When we were building HaS we had to come up with a way to create a spin off in case things were not moving in the direction that we anticipated. I have to mention that HaS is not open for business yet because of one simple reason: We are a very small team.

Bubble Witch Saga has 26 months since its initial launch on the Facebook platform and 16 months since its launch on the mobile market. Despite that, the game manages to maintain its position in Top 10 games on the Facebook platform and on mobile it remains the most popular game in the bubble shooters category, still receiving the best reviews and comments.

Meteor is an open-source platform for a much faster creation of web applications, no matter the experience level of the programmer. The moment you start a new project or you want to write your own web application is usually followed by the question: “Which is the most appropriate framework for my application?” Each programmer will have already formed an opinion in this respect.

Attila: Do you think that a generalist approach is something that can be sustained? For how long can it be sustained? Do we need to specialize in different subdomains?
Richard: I think the body of work has been large enough that we always needed specialists. There are too many skills to know, but each one has its role.