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.

Imagine the following situation: a team has developed for 6 months a great product that immediately sells. Users show their passion for the product by asking new features. If the team does not deliver the new features fast enough, their happiness will decrease. They might even switch to a competing application. The team must deliver quickly.

Lately, the Romanian entrepreneurs have had an increasing number of options to facilitate them in developing their business. Be they non-refundable funds, entrepreneurial communities and business incubators, all these programs are an irrefutable aid, especially during the first few steps of business development.

The last article was a short introduction to the language, being more concerned with presenting the history of the language and the benefits of using it and giving a lesser importance to syntax. This time, however, we will discuss the types of the Haskell language. The most defining attribute of Haskell is its static typing system: each expression has a type which is known from compile time. Moreover, there are no implicit conversions between similar types: the programmer is the one responsible for doing them in places where they are needed.

For this article I’ve picked a series of numbers: 1957, 7400, 196/17, 27/100000000. They describe the path from the inauguration of the first ITC institution till the auto-organization of the current community into a guild. In short, I will refer to the historical context, the evolution and the current stage.

Mobile security has become increasingly important in mobile application development due to sensitive information stored on our smartphones. All expectation and predictions of usage and projected usage are broken year after year because of the “flood” of smartphone users at the disadvantage of those using laptops or desktops. Who can blame them? The handheld device has become the “wallet” of the modern era, filled with personally identifiable information (photos, videos, notes) and private data (from healthcare, medical data to diaries, passes or coupons).

A web developer, Haymo Meran and the ghost of Prince Johann Adam Andreas von Liechtenstein walk into a palace… Sounds like the beginning of a crazy joke but you tell that to anyone you know and they won’t have a clue what happens next. Well, unless they’ve been to or heard of jQuery Europe 2013. Truth be told, I’ve seen no actual sign that the prince’s spirit was with us, and there were 300 developers (or better said, jQuery enthusiasts), not one. The rest however is quite factual and certainly not a joke, amazing as it may sound.

Neo4j is an open-source database based on graph theory, an optimized solution to simulate and interrogate great amounts of interconnected data, represented by graph type structures. The dynamics, the increase in the amount of data, as well as the continuous evolution of information processing has entailed the breaking out of the traditional database area and the orientation towards NOSQL solutions.

Though we find ourselves at the beginning in so far as the Romanian startups are concerned and we cannot yet boast about a mass culture of the autochthon IT environment, its advocates begin to make their presence seen more and more. Through the actions and the facilities offered they have a common goal, namely to support the local businesses and their success. The present article is designed as a list of contacts for anyone who wishes to launch a startup.

The month of May started with good news for the Romanian community of technology entrepreneurs: TechHub Bucharest was officially launched, the first co-working space in Romania, exclusively dedicated to them and which belongs to the international network TechHub.

Test Driven Development (TDD) is a software development technique that combines Test First Development (TFD) with refactoring. The goal of test driven development is split between multiple points of view: code specification, not validation; in other words, is a way of thinking from the requirements or designs point of view before we can write functional code (TDD is an agile requirement and an agile design technique). Another point of view is that TDD represents a programming technique of writing clean and functional code.

In “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think” authors Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier begin by presenting the situation of the year 2009, when the virus H1N1 represented a major concern for World Health Organisation and, in particular, for the American government. The rapid evolution of the epidemics created difficulties for CDC (Centre for Disease Control and Prevention), a governmental agency, as it reported the situation with a delay of 2 weeks in comparison to the reality in the field, partly because the population did not come into contact with the medical personnel after the first symptoms appeared. Real-time reporting would have allowed for a better understanding of the size of the epidemics, an optimisation of the prevention and treatment tactics, actions with the potential of saving lives in a disaster which ultimately amounted to 284,000 victims.

These days the challenge of building a successful product includes ensuring that the product uses the available hardware resources in an efficient manner. This usually means clustering for all but the most trivial problems since our datasets have outgrown our individual computers considerably. However clustering brings a set of new problems: splitting up the processing between nodes, orchestrating the process and very importantly - ensuring that we don’t lose any data / progress if a subset of nodes goes offline - a possibility which increases dramatically as we add more and more nodes to our cluster.

In the previous number we’ve discovered what the secret of Hadoop is when it needs to store hundreds of TB. Based on a simple master-slave architecture, Hadoop is a system that can very easily store and manipulate a big amount of data. Hadoop contains two types of nodes for storing data. The NameNode is the node that plays the role of master. It knows the name and locations of each file that Hadoop stores.

The story NGO CONNECT is a wonderful story that started on the night of 24 of May. 7 young entrepreneurs that didn’t know each other came from 3 different cities in Tirgu Mures. They traveled hundreds of kilometers because the idea of SW seemed like one that would bring them a nice experience. It turned out to be one of the best experiences of their lives…one never to be forgotten and one that can bring joy to them but most importantly to others.

In this article I would like to present an introduction in the Performance Testing planning, results collection and analysis based on my experience with Performance Testing. I am presenting this info taking into consideration that the reader has experience in Performance Testing I will refer to some metrics, Non-functional requirements that I have used as examples of some concepts.

The book review for this number of Today Software Magazine belongs to that kind of books category that have an immediate impact on the reader. The focus of the book is on the practical side. The theoretical concepts are gradually introduced, starting with general terms and continuing with specific concepts and best practices. The particularity of the book consists in the fact that they are integrated immediately in an application with numerous features, which is also gradually developed throughout the entire book material.

The present article presents some of the benefits of using the Agile methodology in everyday life in the IT domain. The comparison item is the methodology that was mostly used towards the beginning of the second millennium, the Waterfall methodology, in which many of us have worked and some still do.

I am writing this article, because I have seen the “bad code = lost money” equation way too many times. The article is intended for both technical and nontechnical audiences in the IT industry. I am going to give a short and to the point explanation on how writing clean code impacts positively the financial aspects of a product.

- I got that one too. It’s a simple GPS, it’s cheap and does his job, I really recommend it. Chief appeared surprisingly behind Gogu. Auch!... he caught me wandering on Google. He thought about answering with an excuse, but he soon realized how ridiculous it would have been. Plus he was too interested in the technical details of the GPS. Chief quickly gave him all the information.

The second part of the article „Performance Management” will focus on the tools used in this process. In the same time it will present some practical model that could be easily implemented in every company. In the following part of the article, I will describe a model of defining objectives in the 3 phases of the performance management process:
(1) Define competencies that are necessary for living the company’s values.
(2) Define team objectives: make a short description of them, establish a clear method of measuring them by setting Key Performance Indicators and set the results expected.
(3) Define individual objectives that are allingned with the ones set together with the team.

25 highly trained participants selected among over 200 applications… an international trainer… 8 well known Romanian entrepreneurs and investors… 5 new business ideas… 5 companies which offered grants for the future entrepreneurs… 45 media partners who brought the project to public attention and 176 mentions in the Romanian press. This is what it looks like in numbers. We are talking about the first edition of the entrepreneurial school Start Me Up, which took place in Predeal last year.