March 08, 2016

Use a BPM strategy to modernize legacy applications

As is nearly always the case, enterprise architecture may provide an easy path if an "EA model" is available. It would be fair to say that for a major enterprise to modernize legacy applications on a large scale, it should never proceed without first developing an EA model according to one of the established standards such as TOGAF. Where the scope of application modernization projects is more limited, it's possible to recover business process definitions from current applications. Where you have no EA framework for direct BPM mapping, take application workflows and "abstract" them by grouping application features into the business processes they support.


The Other Side of Agile: Ceremonial Development

As you can see, ironically, the Agile Manifesto is very simple. Good Agile practices are much more in the spirit of Kaizen and continuous improvement, as opposed to the sterile doctor prescription of do’s and don’ts that most people associate with Agile. And when I come to realize it, the most successful teams that I’ve worked with have excelled exactly at this — responding and adapting to change. These teams were great at what they did because they had mechanisms in place for the team to continuously improve its own delivery. Truth be told, they weren’talways great because of their code reviews. Or pair-programming. Or Stand-up meetings. Or user stories. These things were sometimes very important in the delivery, but once something becomes routine, it can be hard to take a step back and evaluate if it is still delivering on its value proposition.


Seagate Reveals World's Fastest SSD

Seagate's new SSD is based on the non-volatile memory express (NVMe) interface, which was developed by a cooperative of more than 80 companies and released in March 2011. The NVMe specification defined an optimized register interface, command set and feature set for SSDs using the PCIe interface -- a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard used in both enterprise and client systems. Intel's SSD 750 series drive, which also uses the NVMe/PCIe interface. The SSD sports read speeds of up to 2,500MB per second or 2.5GB per second. "The unit could be used in an all-flash array or as an accelerated flash tier with hard-disk drives (HDDs) for a more cost-effective hybrid storage alternative," Seagate stated in a news release about the new SSD.


Interview: Laura Galante, FireEye

“How are we not able to solve this problem? Because we don’t have visibility into it? The suspicion is the data is probably sitting there in the private sector because everyone is feeling this too. The perfect marriage was Mandiant sitting there with all of this investigation data and thinking, what if there is something huge here and IP is going out the door? We didn’t know how to think about it, and Mandiant needed intelligence so they hired a few of us out of government to figure out what the data was, how to model and analyse it and that is just what we did.” Galante worked on the APT1 report that was released in February 2013, and this allowed her to see network data on the host side and not just on the network, and understand what malware is sitting there that sends out these alerts.


Breaking the Glass Ceiling in Indian IT Firms

It is not uncommon for women to face unconscious biasness at work, which may impact them negatively and make them feel out of place in a male largely male dominated industry like technology. For instance, unconscious bias can happen when male team members put in long working hours for a project while the female workers may leave the office at fixed times. This can be misconstrued as the male workers contributing more to the project, whereas in reality, both male and female employees could be contributing the same, or the latter even more for that matter. Organizations are now actively working towards mitigating gender bias and bring in more transparency that would make women feel more inclusive. 


Bimodal IT strategy opens up opportunities for innovation

Today's application lifecycle is measured in weeks, not years, meaning neither customers nor employees have the patience for a lengthy software development process. Organizations that are too slow to capitalize on an emerging digital business opportunity lose out to competitors that move quickly. But such a quick process requires using Agile development practices, fostering close cooperation between developers and IT operations, heavily instrumenting applications to measure performance, feature usage and errors, and employing continuous delivery processes that facilitate a steady stream of bug fixes and feature enhancements.


Scrum is Just a Starting Point | The Clever PM

There is certainly value to be had in looking to prescriptive definitions like those found in the Scrum Guide — they provide us all with a common understanding of the component parts of what that particular publisher or consultancy has defined as “Scrum”. It enables us to have intelligent conversations using such jargon words as Product Manager, Scrum Master, Stand Up, Retrospective, and other terms that have only contextual meaning within the world of Scrum. It also provides those who need guidance and assistance in establishing the foundation for Agile practices with some clearly-defined, specifically-actionable, and proven steps to take and ceremonies to implement to achieve their goals.


DHL Asia-Pacific Innovation Centre incubates future logistics technology

“The innovation agenda is not a new one for DHL,” said Mei Pang, vice-president, innovation, solution delivery and service management at DHL customer solutions and innovation in Asia-Pacific. “From an operational point of view, DHL has always known to come out with new things. In 2007, our corporate office in Germany made a decision to invest in a central team to focus on innovation to look at the future of logistics and identify major trends,” Pang told Computer Weekly. “Part of the initiative was to open a conversation with partners, and the approach we take is a very collaborative one where we work with suppliers, customers and academics to focus on the use cases and try to make them practically applicable in our business,” she added. “That concept worked very well in Germany.”


Intel's Pentium Bug Fix Is Proposed as Solution for Dark Pools

The pitch comes as banks have been beset by fines. UBS was fined $14.4 million by the SEC for problems at its private stock-trading platform. Barclays Plc and Credit Suisse Group AG racked up more than $154 million to settle allegations that they misled investors about how their dark pools were managed. Investment Technology Group Inc. agreed to pay $20.3 million for its infractions. Aesthetic Integration was founded by Denis Ignatovich, formerly head of the central risk trading desk at Deutsche Bank AG in London, and Grant Passmore, a mathematician and expert on formal verification.  Passmore said formal verification uses algorithms to analyze other algorithms. Rather than endlessly trying to test possible outcomes, machine reasoning acts like an automated mathematician, creating proofs and theorems to speed up the work.


Testers in TDD teams

The big QA of the Nineties seems history. Many IT organizations have dissolved their QA departments and have spread their testers over Agile teams. However, in many of those teams, the testers are still doing the same manual testing they did in the nineties. Many organizations are therefore still stuck with the same dysfunctional testing they had twenty years ago. The dysfunctionality of Old school QA lies in its excessive use of functional testers. These are professionals specialized in manual testing, but having few technical skills. Their specialization makes functional testers good in 'testing' functionality. However, old school QA has a tendency (and often a commercial interest) to also use these testers to 'check' functionality.



Quote for the day:


"Goals allow you to control the direction of change in your favor." -- Brian Tracy


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