As we all know, nowadays, one of the most widely used methods or manners of work in order to manage project teams is Agile. Agile can be successfully implemented by using Scrum (in my opinion, one of the most widespread approaches), Kanban or others. Everybody does Agile, everybody knows the Agile principles and everybody implements them. Due to the nature of my job, I have been through many projects, from the smallest ones to the biggest ones, from the easiest ones to some of the most difficult projects.

Time is extremely important for the users, reason why we should care. On every project, we should ask ourselves the questions: “Do I save myself a few development hours at the expense of the user?” and “How could I improve the user experience?” People hate wasting time, especially online. We spend so much time online that even the smallest interactions take time. A small inconvenient doesn’t seem much, but more of them put together may lead to frustration and increase the probability for the users to give up using the service you are trying to provide.

There is an undeniable increasing need for data flexibility and scalability, this being the reason why so many have considered NoSQL databases over the last years. However, there are pros and cons and furthermore non-relational databases were never meant to replace relational ones. Software developers and architects often have a hard time choosing one over another, especially when the format of the data is unknown or subject to change.

Visual Studio Online is a platform developed by Microsoft that offers a collection of services for software development. Services available are:
- Source repository (Team Foundation Version Control and Git)
- Tools for planning and tracking projects (work item tracking, planning, management – support for Agile: Scrum, Kanban)
- Test environment (Load testing)
- Continuous integration (build server)

In this article I will try to build upon the concept of Behavior Driven Development(BDD), using the JavaScript testing framework Jasmine. As we already know, JavaScript had a long way down the road, becoming from a simple scripting language, for the world wide web, a full stack development language. Because of this reason it happens, that we have, sometimes undesired, a migration of the business logic from back-end to front-end. This adds a new level of complexity on our client-side layer, therefore this layer will have more responsibilities. What I want to address here, is that once we have more responsibilities on client-side, the project›s maintenance costs are directly impacted.

The most widely used method of logging events for debugging in JavaScript is by calling “console.log(message)” which will show the message in the developer console. To log warnings or errors, developers can also use “console.warn(message)” or “console.error(message)”.

How many times have you heard „But it works on my machine” or „But it works on my local”? How long does it take to setup an environment? How many times have you encountered differences between the production and development environments? Imagine an ideal world where all developers work on the same pre-build platform and the development and production platform share the same specs. This world exists and it’s called virtualization. Vagrant is a virtualization tool, which has an answer for all these questions, making this ideal world reality. It can be used to create and configure lightweight, reproducible and portable development environments.

ÎIn the last 2-3 years, a new buzzword has appeared: deep learning. In 2012, Microsoft presented a pretty impressive demo with an application that recognized spoken English, translated the text to Chinese and then spoke the translation with the original speakers voice.In the same year, Google developed a system that, from 10 million YouTube thumbnails, learned by itself to recognize cats (and 22.000 other categories of objects) .

Today, testers are often viewed as the ones that execute the easier tasks, and whose technical abilities are not as strong as the developers’. There are two divided teams - testers and developers. Instead of focusing on communication and collaboration, the two teams invest effort and energy on proving their individual team does a better job.

An overview of the social and professional actuality reveals a rather exponential trend, especially in the last twenty years, which makes our today’s standards and benefits higher and higher. Beyond obvious evolution, the dynamics and magnitude of these events have led to take place an important, but yet subtle, change of emphasis positioning: the achievements do matter, but more than that, today, it matters most the further options you have. If there are other areas where this is less true, in IT this conclusion is real and representative.

BigData - a fashionable topic that’s confirmed in this current issue where we write about it. BigData concepts and introduction were made in the previous numbers 2, 3 and 4 of the magazine. To summarize, BigData means storing and analyzing large data volumes, of Terra Bytes magnitude. Handling such data amounts raises problems in terms of volume, speed and variety.

PHP is a programming language dedicated to developing web pages and web applications. Its name is a recursive acronym meaning PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, adopted the name after the release of version 3.0. The first version created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, was written in C and was a suite of scripts to monitor visits to his personal page (Personal Home Page Tools)

After mankind got bored of playing with dinosaurs (and also because dinosaurs got killed at some point by a meteorite), some went hunting penguins, some downloaded the first StarCraft(because the latest hasn’t been finished yet - btw it NEVER IS), the rest of them went nuts into entertaining themselves with zebras. But they didn’t have one :-(. The zebras were NOT EVEN BEING INVENTED.
1. And because everyone wanted to understand what a zebra is, they checked with the village guru who told them that a FUNCTIONAL DOCUMENT is required in order to explain what a zebra is.

A modern overview of the IT universe reveals mobile technology as a particularly dynamic domain. This market sector is presently disputed between three major competitors, namely Apple, Nokia and the extended family of Android devices (Samsung, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, etc.). Since recently mobile devices only offered users access to basic applications (e-mail, browsers, calculator and rudimentary games), yet nowadays we are bombarded with financial, health and insurance applications, personal assistant applications and advanced graphics games.

Object / Relational Mapping (ORM) is a programming technique that provides programmers with means of accessing and manipulating the application objects without being interested in where these objects come from. This technique has emerged because of the need to overcome the paradigm difference between the object oriented model (sustained by the current high level programming languages) and the relational model (used by the most popular database management systems). This problem is also referred to as the object relational impedance mismatch.

In the beginnings of the Internet, during Web 1.0 ages, the general trend was to build portals where users could find many useful information about a certain subject. Everybody was impressed that an enormous amount of information could be found in one place. The hunger for information was finally satisfied. Then Web 2.0 generation arrived, which was more adapted to the demands of the new wave of users. These users already had the default right to have information one click away, but more important they needed to socialize, so everyone was connected in the virtual place.