Should a software QA team do unit testing? Hrm, interesting question. Well this article from SearchSoftwareQuality will answer that question and some other questions you may find interesting. :)
Was often called the father of the moving dragon, Liu Zhiqing performs the Bagua Broadsword. Liu Zhiqing was from Gu’an County in Hebei and studied bagua with Liu Baozhen (disciple of Dong Hai Chuan). Liu Zhiqing was in his early 100’s in this video
Behold the youthfulness…
With the ongoing writers’ strike, we don’t need no stinkin’ writers! Here’s how a Japanese TV show entertain the audience: alot of vocalized expressions from the TV hosts, cute chicks, and alot of action! Hold onto your seat and don’t spill the beer…
In today’s corporate world, companies want to hire “stars.” So where do they find these stars? They recruit them from the best universities in the world. Here’s a philosophical analogy: they go to big rocks, unturn them, and hope to discover that star; but what about those small rocks? Well, one of the world’s top financial company, Goldman Sachs, did uncover that small rock and found a gem (a high school dropout) that forever changed the company’s history that survived the Great Depression and made it a success today. Here’s rest of the story from Investor’s Business Daily.
The moral of the story is that you don’t need a degree to become a star. It takes hard work, dedication, perseverance, and “street smarts.” :)
This blog post explains the various software development methodologies:
- Spiral Model
- Incremental Development
- Rational Unified Process (RUP)
- eXtreme Programming (XP)
- Scrum
- Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)
- Crystal Methods (Alistar Cockburn)
- Feature-Driven Development (FDD, Peter Coad)
- Test-Driven Development (TDD)
- Component Based Development (CBD)
- Lean Software Development (LSD, M.Poppendieck)
- Waterfall
Good blog post from Tyner Blain regarding Return on Investment and Agile development.
Tyner Blain blogs:
A client at a large company with large development teams and a long history of waterfall development made a comment: “The only people who are talking about doing this project in Agile are developers who think it will allow them to avoid responsibility.” My client may have been right (that people were saying that) but the developers who were saying it were wrong. Agile increases responsibility - it doesn’t absolve it.
When you’re asked (or required) to do the wrong things, you’re fighting an uphill battle to be able to do the right things. And creating software product success requires you to both do the right things, and do them right. Agile methodologies have been developed specifically to help development teams to do the right things, and to do them right. But the methodologies work because the development teams assume more responsibility, not less.
Amen to that. It’s been an uphill battle for me…
There is no “enterprise” scrum! Scrum is scrum! Key concept is basically the KISS principle and it’s not rocket science.
First off all there is no “Enterprise Scrum” - it is the same simple, empirical framework for developing complex systems that is applied everywhere rather than just in software development.
In Schwaber’s experience the enterprise-wide roll-out of Scrum take some time. He offered the case of a 1000-developer organisation. Here, they spent six months on the roll-out (training everybody in the Scrum practices) and after that 3-5 years to implement it make it stick by iteratively removing the impediments to producing quality software in the organisation. As he said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, so this phase is all about changing people’s habits and getting the waste out of the system. During this implementation a senior management executive Scrum team is in place using Scrum to deal with the impediments and demonstrably solve the top issues as they become visible during the transition.
By the way, here’s Edsger Dijkstra’s take on software quality.
Here’s a two minute preview of the upcoming tv show on NBC:
My thoughts?? *yawnz*
“A little evil is often necessary for obtaining a great good.” — Voltaire
From 37signals,
Overall storage stats (Nov 2007)
* 5.9 terabytes of customer-uploaded files
* 888 GB files uploaded (900,000 requests)
* 2 TB files downloaded (8,500,000 requests)Server stuff
We’re currently upgrading our server infrastructure to use significantly faster hardware along with the Xen virtualization software, so we’ll have fewer servers to manage. Our current server cluster contains around 30 machines, ranging from single processor file servers to 8 CPU application servers, for a total of around 100 CPUs and 200GB of RAM. Over the next couple of months, we plan to reduce the number of servers to 16 with around 92 CPU cores (each significantly faster than what we use today) and around 230 GB of combined RAM. Not only will our applications run faster, but our cluster will be much simpler to manage when we’re done.
Here’s another reference from High Scalability.
The January 2008 issue of Popular Mechanics has a piece on surveillance cameras:
Security expert Bruce Schneier says that it is naive to think that we can stop these technological advances, especially as they become more affordable and are hard-wired into everyday businesses.
Excellent read. :)
My goodness! That’s alot of money per hour. Read here on how Paypal is running a grid of 4000 Redhat Linux boxes.
PayPal takes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and strips out all features unnecessary to its business, then adds proprietary extensions around security. Another virtue of the grid is that PayPal’s 800 engineers can all get a copy of that customized system on their development desktops, run tests on their raw software as they work, and develop to PayPal’s needs faster because they’re working in the target environment.
Lo and behold after I performed a “gem update” tonight, I started seeing rails 2.0 being installed! WOOHOO! Let the games begin! It’s a good christmas afterall! :)
UPDATE, Part 2: Activeresource finally showed up in the mirrors and it is now installed. Rails is running perfectly! Awesome!
UPDATE: Oop, I spoke too soon:
ERROR: While executing gem … (Gem::GemNotFoundException)
Could not find activeresource (= 2.0.0) in any repository
:(
I’ve blogged about this last year. Above is a video of Jean-Yves Blondeau skating through the mountainous, 2-lane road on Grimselpass in Switzerland. What’s amazing is that this is not a demo but a live run — he’s not alone on the road!