Five percent of the people think; Ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.
- Thomas A. Edison

In November 2014, a local IT company was the host of an event dedicated to Testers: Rapid Software Testing. At the end of this event, for a day, the speaker tackled a rare subject for the IT industry, but important for testers and analysts: Critical Thinking. The trainer of the event was Michael Bolton (not the singer!), a well-known figure in the Testing Industry. Although the event was directed towards Testers, some of the information regarding Critical Thinking applies to Business Analysts as well.

The use of version control has become the normal way of working while the latest version control tools enable us, the developers, to play with branches the way it suits us the most. Plenty was written about branching strategies and while some of them are very popular, almost all of them have a common problem that at some points must be handled. This is the merging problem. There is a reason why people are talking not only about their “branching strategy”, but about the “branching and merging strategy”.

Great success stories in businesses are often based on being first on the market, but they thrive by being able to outmanoeuvre the competition and adapt rapidly. The easiest domain that can be used to indicate different examples remains nowadays the technology world, where we can find different good and bad stories. “The first major social network, Friendster, was trumped by MySpace, which in turn was trumped by Facebook. Netscape was trumped by Yahoo!, which was then trumped by Google”. We all know that this is not the end and, somewhere, into a basement or a small garage, someone is building the next 'big thing' that can become the main actor on the market.

The first challenge of any outsourcing company is to get clients. Once (and if) you do, the pressure moves on to keeping the partnership going and growing. To keep things on an honest side, in the beginning of the relationship with your new client you are far from being partners (even further from trusted partners). You are considered a vendor and in the beginning there will be a normal and expected dose of scepticism. But the relationship can evolve and it may go through the following stages described in the lines below. I didn’t come up with and can’t take credit for them, but I find them to be very valid

One of the oldest military treatises and one of the most successful is "Sun Tzu's Art of War". The book was written around 500 BC by a general from the court of King of Wu, and presents a set of 13 chapters with precepts about tactics and strategies in warfare. I've read the book for the first time some years ago, but looking at some trends in the communication techniques and management style determined me to read it again.

Smartweb is an annual event dedicated to designers, developers and entrepreneurs from South Eastern Europe. This year, Smartweb was held in Bucharest, organized by Evensys, and I had the chance to be there thanked to Today Software Magazine. The event is split in two parts lasting two days: on the first day, there are two parallel eight hour workshops, and on the second day, there is a conference with worldwide known speakers. This year, Jeremy Keith, Kaelig, Marko Dugonjic, Harry Roberts, Remy Sharp, Zoe Gillentwater, Ana Tudor and Bruce Lawson were present in Bucharest. Their presentations tackled themes like responsive design, Html, Css, Javascript and web standards.

In the past years, we could notice major changes of the fundamental concepts software development relies on: a faster pace of innovation and releases, the focus on cross-device development strategies and the collaboration within the community of developers that is based more and more on open source. In addition to this, there is an increasing need for developers to maintain older applications up to date and to integrate easily new technologies within them. Microsoft tried to find an answer for all these demands by establishing a new trend of its well-known framework .NET, a trend that is referred to as vNext.

The purpose of this article is to shed some light on the role and responsibilities of the product owner, as observed and implemented in the Cluj software world/environment by the author. The topic is broad and cannot be fully covered in a single article, but I would like to provide one of many points of view in which the subject can be tackled inside each team and company.

When implementing a new functionality you have two options: blue or red – quick and dirty or smart and clean. If you chose the first option you create a debt that has to be paid at some point. If you go with the second option it takes longer to implement new features but it makes change easier in the future.

CQRS is an architectural pattern that recommends the separation between the command processing responsibility and query responsibility. Consequently, the pattern proposes that it is not necessary to have the same data store or even technology, for both read and write purposes.

A very common challenge in an IT business analyst’s career is represented by the modelling of use cases, of processes, of the domain model and of the interactions among processes, systems and actors, in the projects on which he/she operates. Usually, the textual representation of functional requirements, even if it is correctly structured as epics or user stories, is not enough to understand thoroughly a certain functionality or business process. Then, functional gaps, bottlenecks, erroneous or redundant communications, functional silos or even optimization opportunities become less visible.

In this article I would like to offer you a perspective on the quality of the source code and on the major influence that it has in the final value of the cost of production and maintenance of software systems. I would also like to present to you the advantages of using a platform of quality management in the process of Continuous Integration and to show you the way in which the values resulted from the static code analysis can be used in order to detect the areas from the system which have a major negative impact on its maintenance.

The Cluj R&A Endava team operationally hosted The Open Championship, golf’s biggest European Open, for the 3rd time in a row and contributed to another successful chapter of Open’s history. The Open Championship® is organized by the R&A® starting with the 19th century and the sport barriers were long time exceeded – currently The Open® represents one of Scotland’s most popular icons and draws hundreds of thousands of tourists each year.

This is a story about simplicity and robustness, two terms that apparently don’t fit very well together in the same sentence while speaking of software development. And this was a reality back in the days when everybody was building their own backend solution, their own communication stack, their own language, their own … whatever. Cloud based platforms transformed this complicated world into a world where the most challenging matter is to have the right world and business understanding; technical stuff? – forget about it, it’s in the cloud, up and running, just use it.

The dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have, because when you’re talking about building a house, you’re talking about dreams. Robert A. M. Stern Nowadays, application development is not only about module development, software maintenance, which was created many years ago, or the simple functionality testing. The Romanian ‘softists’ have reached the level in which not only the client or „developer” wants more, but the market wants something more from ‘Romanian developers’.

All over the world, business analysis is a highly interesting field which concerns equally the companies and their customers. But the gap between theory and reality proves that this practice is still a fresh one. Despite their domain knowledge, from non-governmental organizations to finances, banks or constructions, the difference between success and failure depends on the capacity to change and adapt to market needs, at customer’s requirements which are more and more diversified.

The power of processing various information using small devices allows us to conduct our work efficiently even outside the office. In the context of continuous development of technology, the storage and display of information capacity is improved and the communication possibilities between devices are unlimited. In such an environment, a real challenge in usability is represented by the desire to satisfy every wish of the persons that are using such devices.

How many times you’ve encountered the issue of improving the performance of your SQL Server queries? Did you know how to tackle the problem? Myself, I’ve encountered the issue enough times before finally understanding and putting into practice a SQL Server functionality that solves, at least in part, the challenge.We all know that in the development stage, major performance issues are rare, and that is happening with different reasons: low data volume, perfect development environment, low variations on scenarios and user stories, etc.

Dependency Injection (DI) is a specialized form of Inversion of Control(IoC) – a broader OOP concept where objects are coupled by an external source at runtime – usually a container – also referred as IoC container. Using IoC we can select specific implementation of the dependencies at runtime which is a major advantage when dealing with Unit Testing for example. Injecting mock dependencies becomes trivial leading to easily test the application in isolation.