I recently attended an Al Di Meola concert in Cluj. The guitar craftsmanship was exquisite and we recommend that you attend his concerts, especially since I haven’t seen many developers in the room. Beyond the comfort his music conveys, the link it has with the IT world lies in the EXQUISITE execution and the predictability of the music line: each note perfectly matched all the other notes, adapting itself in the core architecture of the song, so that there was no feeling of shock or surprise. This musical principle can be transposed in the development of software products where – I believe – it is important that everything unfolds in a predictable manner without developing by chance. The quality of the final software is more important than the maximum speed of execution the team can reach because what lies behind it is dexterity, approach depth and skill display. On the other hand, startups execute very quickly – it doesn’t really matter how. It only matters to be the first on the market. Is this the correct approach? Shouldn’t quality and novelty combined be the success recipe for developing products? It might be the case that the lack of quality and predictability are the missing attributes of a startup that has the most innovative idea ever, but which ends up as a huge fail. A product which did not adhere to superficiality is the first iPad by Apple. There were many mp3 player products on the market, for many years, but the quality of the execution and the innovation behind it led to an entire market being won over by this product. My advice to those of you who build products is to think twice before launching the product, because being one or two sprints late for the sake of quality might be extremely important.
Since we talk about products, I invite you to read two papers on this topic: a product presentation, Flare - Home security, and Good practices in product development. Our permanent startup feature also relates to this topic. As of the last TSM issue, we began including details about the teams behind the startups. We then move onto security with Vulnerability management and risk evaluation in IT security and Big boys don’t cry, they backup periodically. Next is a technical paper on how virtual machines function in Java and how related optimizations are performed: Is it really working? I can’t believe it!. We continue with test automation in Unit tests with Spock. Finally, I invite you to read an interview with Jennifer Marsman, from Microsoft, on AI.