I hesitated as my mouth hung open a bit. A senior leader in a development organization had just asked, "Why is product important?"
We’d been discussing an evolution in thinking in our industry — the movement from being process-focused to being progress-focused and now, the need to be product-focused. He innocently asked the question as he attempted to process the idea that what we build is more important than how quickly and efficiently we build it.
In today’s software world, everything’s changed when it comes to operational (non-functional) requirements. We have applications running on thousands of cores, producing petabytes of data, and, of course, users expect to have a response time under 100ms. Several years ago, we used to build systems that blocked certain operations because programming models used back then didn’t allow many asynchronous things to happen in code. Unfortunately, these systems aren’t as responsive as we expect them to be, they cannot be scaled that easily, and they use processor time waiting for operations to complete when they could do something else (processing another request, doing some background calculations, etc.).
The Reactive Manifesto was created in order to define the properties of a system that’s able to respond to the aforementioned challenges. Systems that are reactive are Message Driven, Responsive, Resilient, and Elastic (Image 1). In this blog post, I’ll focus on how the Axon Framework helps us build reactive systems.
As a consultant, I get to see a lot of different organizations and work with a variety of teams. By now, virtually everyone has at least heard of Agile and read the Manifesto. We also seem to have, in technology adoption terms, crossed the chasm, and so adoption by more traditional, sometimes slower moving, global scale organizations is well underway. Agile has finally been vetted by the early adopters and is now becoming mainstream.
I, like others, talk about the difference between "doing Agile" and "being agile" — differing the big "A" Agile and the little "a" agile is intentional [BC1]. From an intellectual perspective, the notion of Agile being a mindset and a different way of seeing and acting in the world rather than a methodology or a process usually resonates. Still, though, I see a tendency to want an "Agile checklist"; a tendency toward Agile for the sake of being able to say "we’re Agile" rather than genuinely zeroing in on value and excellence. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard, "It’s not ‘Agile’ if you aren’t doing <insert practice here>."
Spring Security provides comprehensive security services for J2EE-based enterprise software applications. It is powerful, flexible, and pluggable. It is not like a Proxy server, firewall, OS level Security, Intrusion Detection System, or JVM Security.
OAuth is an open-authorization protocol that allows accessing resources of the resource owner by enabling the client applications on HTTP services, such as Gmail, GitHub, etc.
When I teach any sort of product/project/portfolio management, I ask, "Who believes multitasking works?" Always, at least several managers raise their hands. They believe multitasking works because they multitask all the time. Why? Because the managers have short work-time and long decision-wait time.
If you are a manager, your time for any given decision probably looks like this:
The US Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act was quietly enacted into law on March 23, 2018. I say quietly due to the controversial nature of how it was passed — snuck into the back of a 2,300-page Federal spending bill on the eve of Congress’ vote. While debate rages on about both the way the bill was passed, and about the wide latitude the Act gives to the President and the State Department, the fact remains that it has been signed into law, and organizations need to start planning how to respond. For many, both in the US and abroad, that planning has drawn increased interest in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs), and specifically, in cloud encryption.
The CLOUD Act is meant to expedite law enforcement access to online/cloud data, specifically when that data is stored abroad. CLOUD is an update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which was passed in 1986, long before cloud was even a twinkle in any entrepreneur’s eyes. Under ECPA, the only way for the US and a foreign government to exchange such data was under a Mutual Legal-Assistance Treaty (MLAT), which must be passed by a 2/3 vote of the Senate.
“Digital twins” are commonly associated with Industrial Internet of Things installations, in which they are widely used. They generally work as follows: the sensors from a machine are mapped to a digital abstraction, or “twin,” making it easier to monitor the machine and know when it needs maintenance. The digital twin can also be used to model the lifecycle of the machine, predicting when, for example, individual parts are likely to fail. In fact, any physical asset that is receptive to monitoring and prediction, such as a city or even the human body, could benefit from a digital twin.
But the “digital twin” as a concept can also be extended in a different direction—to non-physical modeling. One particular area where it can be effective is in managing customer relationships, i.e. tracking and accurately predicting a customer’s needs. Basically, it can enable businesses to offer “the right product at the right time.”
“We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.” – Carl Rogers
This thought came to my mind when we were doing the design thinking workshop. We were emphasizing the empathy aspect with the people who will build a product and consume the solutions. Why do we not, as coaches, practice the same our coaching teams? That’s how I started digging more into this.
A few of my fellow coaches are sharing stories from their team, speak about how Scrum Masters will not allow others to talk. He/she will keep talking about what Scrum guides say and what we should do according to them. He/she as a Scrum Master will not listen to the team members.
In an ideal world, every project is finished on time, and within the estimated budget. Even better, the budget has allowed teams to develop additional features and test everything one more time before the release. In the real world, the development process can encounter several difficulties, and technical debt is among the most common issues the project may face. It is essential to understand what technical debt is, how to evaluate it and especially how to tackle it.
Technical debt is the additional work needed to complete the software development. But this notion does not refer solely to the projects that are in development. This issue often follows the projects that have been production for some time. This may be anything, like some module written on legacy technology, that holds the project back from including a new functionality or influence overall software stability. In this particular case, technical debt can be calculated as the time or money needed for the refactoring of this module’s code or porting it to the new technology. But usually it is never that simple and the software system includes a number of drawbacks that can be included in the technical debt of the project.
Java developers usually deal with collections such as ArrayList and HashSet. Java 8 came with lambda and the streaming API that helps us to easily work with collections. In most cases, we work with a few thousands of items and performance isn’t a concern. But, in some extreme situations, when we have to travel over a few millions of items several times, performance will become a pain.
I use JMH for checking the running time of each code snippet.
