In a dynamic world, in which business objectives change along the domain trends and based on the ever varying consumer's interest, the mutual understanding of the requirements by those that formulate them and by those who implement them represents the key to succeed in software development projects.

With the transition to event-based architectures, messaging systems have become the central component of the enterprise architecture. But as enterprises process more and more data, the performance of the messaging system becomes even more important, requiring fast, scalable solutions. Apache Kafka is a relatively new player in the messaging systems field, but it has already proven itself as one of the best-performing messaging solutions out there. It has been benchmarked to handle up to a 1 million messages per second on a 3 node cluster made of commodity hardware.

After being in the software industry for more than 9 years now I've pretty much done a little bit of everything. I was an intern that did testing in order to learn how to code, I was a software developer in a small firm and I did everything from the ground up, including database development, and now I am a QA engineer at Betfair. In my current role I am involved in functional testing with an emphasis on automation, continuous delivery and performance testing. When I started thinking about studying software development I never imagined what my path would be. But all the things that I've done have helped me become good at what I do now.

Over 10 years ago, a one day security conference was organized at my university. I wanted to participate, but there were limited places, so they created a registration page which, they said, would open next day at 12 o’clock sharp. I really wanted to participate and especially as they advertised a free T-shirt for the first 20 registrations. Being a pretty good developer at that time, I took a look at the site, found a vulnerability and managed to register myself before the registration opened officially. The next day, I show up to the conference entrance, I say my name, the guy checks me out on the list, I take a quick snoop and I see myself on top of the list, next to my name it says registration time 11:58. I smile :) He says “ahhh... you’re the one... how did you do that??” I ask: do I get a T-shirt ? He says no, you get something better and later he awards me publicly a book: Writing secure code by Michael Howard si David LeBlanc. I started wondering why he is giving me the book, he needs that book more than me! He needs to learn how to write secure code! not me!

Like any other success story, when it comes to Performance Testing our story mixes people and processes altogether. Different companies might be built upon different cultures so they implement various mixtures of people and processes – versed teams that have dedicated performance testers might use only guidelines as a process while the more agile teams which rotate the performance tester role between team members, would probably need more detailed processes, checklists, so that the entire performance testing flow would be consistent from one sprint to another and the results offer the same level of confidence.

If you happen to pass by Betfair’s office in October, there are high chances you’ll hear everybody talking about FedEx Day. You don’t really know what to expect. Are we ordering something? Is this some kind of special delivery that everybody’s excited about? Are we getting something cool? Besides, if you’re a manager it looks bad not to have the tiniest clue of what’s going on. But I’m freaking out for no good reason. Just when I could picture the FedEx van in front of the office, things start to get clearer.

The recent boost in online gambling means that there will always be people who will try to bypass or completely avoid regular business behaviour and they will then use this in their advantage. I’m talking mainly about impersonification, taking unfair advantage of promotions, syndicates or just trying to find a leak in the system business flow. Working at Betfair taught me that when you develop broad spectrum applications, you need to put that 10% (or more) extra care in order to secure your application. However, this often proves that it’s not enough and you need to take steps in order to mitigate fraudsters.

My name is Marius Ciotlos and I’m a Delivery Manager at Betfair. Since I started working in the IT industry I’ve been in a lot of different roles from software development to network support and computer technical support and after so many years in the industry, I hardly get excited or impressed by a single tool, because so few are actually innovating. Many tools out there are very similar with just different flavors, or so specific in their task that it is up to you to find how to build your workflow with them.

Usually, a test written in Selenium, Java and TestNG is meant to check the accuracy of items on a web page or that of a module on a web page. The classical approach of such a type of testing is represented by the high number of asserts, to compare all the desired properties to their expected values. This approach has plenty of drawbacks, among which we could mention the difficult maintenance of tests, the waste of code-lines, lack of intelligibility. In order to avoid these drawbacks, a different approach of this type of tests is represented by the conception of tests based on the comparison of some objects.

A 2013 research shows that 77% of the consumers prefer receiving an email instead of a social media message or an SMS. In 2014, an email campaign with a powerful marketing content can be a powerful, revenue generating tool. Before planning any campaign you should make sure that:
The data base only contains users who have agreed to receive email communications from the company.
Users who have bought a product or service in the last 18 months.

Initiating a project can most of the times be boring when it is no longer a challenge. YEOMAN – how can it help us? When starting a new project, in order to enhance productivity and the pleasure of working, Yeoman is based on three tools:
Yo
It helps creating the files structure and it already specifies general configurations for Grunt and Bower.

Let’s have a quick look over the history and development of the HTTP protocol (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), in order to better understand the modifications proposed for the 2.0 version. HTTP is one of the protocols that have nourished the spectacular evolution of the Internet: it allows the clients to communicate with the servers, which is the base of what the Internet is today.

I took part this year, for the first time, in the Startup Weekend Cluj. And not just like that, I went there prepared to present my own idea. At the first pitch, this idea was called TaskList, but by the end of the event it had changed into Do It For. I started with the idea of a site on which you could externalize those tasks you don’t know, cannot or don’t want to do yourself. I was thinking about cleaning, laundry washing, cooking, queuing, car washing, etc.

The field of software testing has become increasingly dynamic, new test methods are introduced, more concepts are refined or reinvented. The famous phrase „anyone can test” begins to be increasingly difficult to be confirmed, due to the high technical level and technologies used in application development.

After we started with the introduction to the “big data” world in the second issue and we continued with the article on NoSQL type of databases in the third issue, we are now introducing another important member of the family: Apache Hadoop. Apache Hadoop is a framework facilitating processing of large (and very large) data sets, running on an array of machines and using a simple programming model (map/reduce paradigm). It is designed to scale from few machines (even one) to several thousands, each of those contributing processing power and storage. Apache Hadoop does not rely on hardware for “high-availability”, but the library is designed to detect the errors at the application level.