Short Takes: December 15, 2009
By SD Times Editorial Board
January 1, 2010 —
A touch of swag
Microsoft gave PDC attendees free touch-screen laptops. It usually takes everyone out for a night at Universal Studios. This year's investment in swag underscores just how seriously it takes natural interfaces.
There are many possibilities for killer apps, such as games, that take advantage of the touch-screen. One of the keynote demos was a Silverlight puzzle, which was pretty neat. Microsoft has now armed some of its best developers with the hardware that they need to create those apps. I hope I am not disappointed. — David Worthington
King of Pop, and of Search
Microsoft recently announced that in 2009, the No. 1 search query entered into its Bing search engine was "Michael Jackson." The King of Pop outdid "swine flu" and "stock market," which were in the top 5 searches. The other two top queries were "Twitter" and "Farrah Fawcett."
Strange coincidence that Microsoft unveiled Bing barely a month before Jackson's death on June 25. I bet when they were designing Bing, the folks at Microsoft had little idea that search engine hits would be initially led by a moon-walking pop singer whose heyday was around the time Microsoft released its first version of Windows. But I guess when you're trying to innovate for the future, it's never such a bad thing to bring a little of the past with you. — Jeff Feinman
Agile for safety-critical software
A lot of talk around agile development these days is about scalability and distributed development, so large enterprises can benefit from the techniques. For organizations creating safety-critical software, such as the kind used in airplanes and traffic control systems, there are other issues to consider.
Jose Ruiz, a software engineer at AdaCore, is working with a team to develop a framework that will help the company’s customers adopt agile practices. Safety-critical software requires that certification standards be met, and that seemingly goes against one of agile development’s prime tenets: be able to adjust to change quickly.
“The certification process always is associated with a typical ‘V’ development model of requirements, modeling, coding and testing at the end,” Ruiz said. “Once all of the software and artifacts have gone through certification, it’s costly and hard to introduce any modification.”
Yet one agile technique (continuous integration) is being used to create something Ruiz called continuous certification. This requires builds, tests and requirements to be deeply integrated, so that any change in the system triggers verifications and notifies developers about artifacts that no longer are valid and need to be redone.
“In rigid development, you don’t pick this up until the end, when it’s most costly to fix,” Ruiz said. Using agile, he said, lets software evolve more easily and at a much lower cost. — David Rubinstein
Related Search Term(s): Short Takes
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/33990
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Zeichick’s Take: Radio moves from analog waveforms to digital packets
Streaming radio highlights the need for streaming applications to be designed to take up as little bandwidth as possible
|
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Add Instant Mobile Cloud Capabilities to its Industry Leading Titanium Platform
Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers
|
|
ComponentOne Releases a Collection of 40+ UI Widgets Powered by HTML5 and jQuery
ComponentOne has announced the 2012 release of Wijmo: a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
|
|
Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles
|
|
Xceed releases UX-focused suite for Microsoft’s WPF
"Blendables" helps match user experiences to developer visions
|
Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.
|
|
Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.
|
|
RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!
|
|
GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
|
The Hidden Costs of Software Licensing
Moving beyond paper-based software licensing to more flexible, software-based licensing is a business decision. There is a growing trend tow...
|
|
Case Study: You May Need a Development Mechanic
As a contractor for a major financial player in Germany, SOBEGE, a German-based consultancy specializing in embedded IT and web services, wa...
|
|
Ensuring Software Quality at a Major International Bank
One of the world’s leading international banks has adopted AgitarOne technology for delivering generated unit tests for their Java software...
|
|
Load Testing Adobe Flex Applications
Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you’ve worked with before. For classic HTML web applications, the server does all...
|