Well folks, my time with Software Development Times is coming to an end. I have been offered a position with a public relations firm located in New York City, so I will be utilizing my skills down in the Financial District. So my over three years with SD Times will come to a close, and I must bid a fond farewell.  

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time as an assistant editor with Software Development Times, as well as Systems Management News. I have written hundreds, maybe thousands, of articles for almost the last 75 issues of the newspaper. I have written special reports and blog entries. I served as managing editor of the e-newsletter for a significant period of time. I have gathered up data and information for datawatch, news briefs and business briefs. Basically, I've had the opportunity to contribute to every aspect of the print newspaper and website. The things I've learned from working on this newspaper, and the constant input I got from my editor and colleagues, will no doubt be very beneficial to me as I move forward with my career in the media industry. My time here has been very educational, and I have nothing but good things to say about SD Times.      

Thank you to everyone who made my life easier in hunting down information for stories and helping us to deliver some strong content. I appreciate all the effort you put in to help me write some fun and hopefully useful stuff.

My last day with SD Times will be Dec. 30. Feel free to reach out to me so I can get the chance to say bye!

As I speak with many, many companies for an upcoming story on ALM, I wanted to share some insight from some of the folks I've been talking with. We are taking a look into how agile development is affecting the way application life-cycle management companies deliver their products, and one thing that EVERYBODY is agreeing on is that 100% of their customers are at the very least thinking about adopting agile processes. 

Development teams are adapting to shorter cycles with software that allows everyone involved to keep up to speed with what everyone else is doing. 

“In the old days, we would be able to wait for the Monday meeting to get status updates,” said Richard Leavitt, executive vice president of worldwide marekting at Rally Software. “Well, in a two-week iteration, there’s only two Mondays, so you could never wait to find out that, say, a big defect has just gotten reported. Now, everyone has real-time feedback and updates.”

Paula Rome, a product manager with Seapine, added that nowadays, QA testers will sit in on meetings with builders and other members of a development team, which wasn’t always the case in traditional development environments. 

“It’s forcing your team members to talk more to share more, and it’s sort of a thought-changer,” Rome said of agile. “People are thinking about quality from the beginning. I think the best agile teams are making sure they know what will make their user stories successful. It might be performance issues, it might be load issues; you don’t get away from that in a good agile process.”

But while agile is catching on like wildfire in today's software development world, it took some time to become the talk of the town. Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud, said this was because it's alot easier to get people interested in new tools than it is new processes.

“Part of what takes a thing like agile some time to get adopted is, I think, naturally, we want to buy a tool, not a process," he said. "So if I hear about this thing called agile, I’ll say well, 'Where do I buy the agile software package?' It’s a little difficult to get people to change their processes."

The iToilet!

It was George Costanza’s ticket to fame and fortune; an iPhone application that could use GPS to locate the nearest toilet wherever a user might be in the world.
However, as viewers of the show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” would know all too well, George (Jason Alexander) lost half of his riches when he invested his money with Bernie Madoff.

The iToilet served as a key chronological update for the “Seinfeld” universe in a fictional reunion show taking place on this past season’s finale of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which centers around “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David. David and his writers used the concept of the iToilet to link “Seinfeld,” which went off the air in 1998, to the modern world, giving an idea of what beloved characters Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine would be up to in the late 2000’s.

In addition to being a funny bit, it also popped a question in my mind....Why didn't I think of that???

There are lots of developers out there that are raking in a nice amount of money and popularity from creating applications that are nowhere near as useful as the fictional iToilet. For instance, I recently visited my brother down in Tampa Bay, and two of his friends came over to watch a football game. While we were watching the New York Giants dispose of the Dallas Cowboys, his two friends broke out their iPhones to gleefully display some apps they have; one of them showed an app of a bikini-clad woman washing the screen with a window washer to "clean" the screen. The other had a Zippo lighter application, where you can actually flick the phone itself to snap the cap back onto the virtual lighter. 

It just goes to show that it doesn't take oodles of creative genius to make some waves in the iPhone app world. If I spent about 5-10 minutes to think on it, I'd imagine I could come up with something as snazzy as a Zippo lighter app (the old melon is churning as I write this). It might take a longer period of thought to come up with something as useful as the iToilet, but if I put my mind to it, I don't think it's completely out of the question. Until then, keep those apps rollin'!

Two security companies are combining the forces of static and dynamic analysis in a software-as-a-service offering released today.

Fortify Software is leveraging the dynamic analysis capabilities of WhiteHat in its Fortify on Demand analyzer.    

Taylor McKinley, a product manager with Fortify, said his company has plenty of familiarity with WhiteHat. He praised WhiteHat’s dynamic testing offering, and he noted that it’s also a software-as-a-service tool.

“Plus, we know [WhiteHat founder] Jeremiah Grossman very well; our chief scientist, Brian Chess, has done a lot of research with Grossman.”

Additionally, Jacob West, manager of Fortify’s Security Research Group, is expected to conduct a presentation with Grossman at RSA Conference in March on correlating results of static and dynamic analysis, according to McKinley.   

“So both companies are investing a lot of time and energy into pushing the boundaries when it comes to integrating static and dynamic analysis, and this is a great first step,” he said.

The application behavior virtualization capabilities of Parasoft's SOAtest 6.2 can be related to an online banking interface, according to Rami Jaamour, Parasoft's SOA solutions product manager.

Jaamour explained how a Web app talks to a back-end system when it is handling different actions that customers do, such as transactions and deposits. If a developer needs to add new capabilties to the online banking application, they might not have the proper authorization to access the back-end system and may not even know who does have proper access to it. What SOAtest can do is take a snapshot of that back-end system so that the developer can run scenarios off of it and test new capabilities for the application to see how it meshes with the back end.        

"With application behavior virtualization, you are able to emulate the behavior of this back-end system that has the account," Jaamour said. "Your online banking application can talk to the emulated version of the back end so that you can run your use case scenarios and do your development work on it."

CA is giving a developers the chance to mold its future Agile Planner tool with the Agile Planner Community.

Developers can suggest, critique and share their thoughts on the best ways to carry out agile project management. There are discussion forums, and CA executives said that ideas will be mulled over and voted on by other developers involved in the community. Might not be a bad chance to share your thoughts on how to do agile the right way. As some initial incentive, CA said the first 50 ideas to be submitted before Dec. 1 will be entered in a drawing to win one of five Flip video cameras. 

Agile Planner is currently under development and is expected to be released in the spring.

I attended the Business of APIs Conference earlier this week in New York City, held by API services provider Mashery, and heard some interesting thoughts on what APIs are all about in today's world (literally today, not two years ago or in the ancient times of 5-10 years ago in Technology Land).

ProgrammableWeb founder John Musser was the first speaker of the day, and later in the afternoon, he told me that there's often a fear or risk involved in opening up an API. To combat that fear, organizations should open APIs gradually.

"Open up pieces of functionality one by one and see how it goes," Musser said. "And then take the next step. You don’t have to go straight in to the point where you’re opening yourself up to things you might not be prepared to handle."

Chad Dickerson, CTO of online handbag marketplace Etsy and former Yahoo employee, made the point that there is always room for improvement when it comes to APIs. "A good API is never finished," he said.

"In the same way that you launch a website and are always adding to it, I think the same thing is true for APIs. If you’re starting an API, you can’t just leave it. It needs to grow as your business grows."

Looks like the sun has set on Darl McBride's controversial tenure with The SCO Group.

As part of its restructuring under a U.S. bankruptcy court trustee, SCO has given CEO Darl McBride his walking papers. McBride was seen as the main driving force behind the seemingly endless lawsuits against Novelll, IBM and Red Hat over who is the true owner of UNIX. COO Jeff Hunsaker, CFO Ken Nielsen and General Counsel Ryan Tibbitts remain, at least for now.

We will have more shortly.  

I just completed a story about an open-source testing framework that is scheduled to drop on Monday the 12th, and while writing the story, I took a deep dive into the world of Scala. Here are a few tidbits I learned about Scala while studying up on it:

-It does static type checking, and can support generic classes and abstract types. The static type is a feature that it shares with its big brother language, Java.

-Its functional programming capabilities can make it faster, according to some. While Java is mostly an object-oriented language, Scala brings a functional-object hybrid that combines the best of both styles.

-It was designed by Martin Odernsky, who also designed the Java extension known as Pizza. I like him already.

-Libraries allow developers to add new language constructs, and any method may be used as an infix or postfix operator.

On a side note, when I Googled "Scala", the Google Maps feature brought up the location of one my favorite hometown Italian restaurants, La Scala, located on Vanderbilt Parkway in Commack, N.Y. So I think it is suffice to say that Scala is ONE SPICY MEAT-A-BALL!

About five years ago, the quality and testing market was "up for grabs," according to Compuware president and COO Bob Paul.

As a result, the company put a lot of investment into QA, but with resources dedicated to places like IT portfolio management and mainframe quality, the company might have bitten off more than it could chew.

“When we looked at our quality and testing assets, we realized we had a mishmash of stuff,” Paul said. “In some cases, it was delivering strong value, but in a lot of cases, the required investment to keep it localized and integrated was a massive, massive investment. A couple of years ago, we looked at our assets and realized that to return Compuware to greatness, it was going to require a level of focus the company hadn’t experienced.”       

As a result, Compuware sold off its QA product line to Micro Focus back in May. However, Compuware apparently wasn't fully ready to give up on the market. With its announced acquisition of Web application management company Gomez today, Compuware not only hopes to add a key missing monitor piece with "beyond the firewall" Web app monitoring, but it also hopes to offer an easier-to-use, already established quality tester. A less "mishmashed" version, if you will.