Since 2002, from the release of Minority Report (directed by Steven Spielberg) in which the main character John Anderton (Tom Cruise) interacts with a computer using a glove and different hand gestures, the technological world started talking about a new way to use computers, where a Natural User Interface – NUI would replace the traditional ways (mouse and keyboard) of human-computer interaction. During the following years, different projects and similar concepts were announced, but only after seven years, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2009 (E3), Microsoft announced Project Natal, focusing on the idea that „You are the controller”

Beginning of 2008, the company I was working for decided we need to become agile and use Scrum. I didn’t quite understand why we should change our way of working especially that we used to follow SDLC (software development life cycle): requirements, design, implementation, testing, maintenance and releases were scheduled at 3-4 months intervals using waterfall.

Functional Programming (FP) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming) is an old concept developed in the 1950s when Lisp language was created. It has its roots in” lambda calculus”, a formal system in mathematical logic, first formulated by Alonzo Church in the 1930s (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ Lambda_calculus). The functions are the main element in FP. Programmers generally work with immutable data structures and pure functions. Functional languages usually provide a set of tools that make it easier to work with functions.

I’ve heard/seen quibbling about Exploratory Testing in various circumstances (groups, meetings) lately. My intention is to make a useful summary (I hope!) of all the ideas I found and tested. I have been listening to Pro and Con dialogues and monologues about exploratory. Following the natural track of an application, I will try to outline and underline some of the arguments.

Hi! I am Horatiu Mocian, the founder of SociaLook (www.socialook.net), a startup which tracks the activity of companies in social media (focusing on Twitter). Even if my startup is quite young, about 1-year old, the story behind it is quite interesting, and I am going to tell you all about it. The SociaLook story started in April 2011, when, after recovering from my first start-up (which failed), I started thinking about my next venture.

I will start by setting forth a dilemma concerning the selection of the interviewee for this number of the magazine: Mr. Dan Luțaș. We were colleagues during high school and college and I’d like to consider him a good friend. At first, this caused an internal conflict between the objectivity in choosing and presenting this article and the subjectivism brought about by the interference of my personal life with my professional career. At the local level, there are many experts whose achievements recommend them for the interview, without generating this conflict, so I’ll be brief in explaining why I stuck to this choice.

When I accepted the invitation to write about “How to prepare for a job interview”, I thought it would be simple. I intend this article to be easy to read and understand, and last but not least, to be an opportunity to learn something useful. When I started to write it, I realized Romanian is not an easy language and it’s even more difficult to express complex ideas in a simple way. After having finished it, I asked a 10-year old child to read it, in order to test its simplicity and fluency. He told me he didn’t understand a thing. So I started all over again.

Gogu is a funny character, cynical at times, an introvert to whom the interior monologue is an alternative to the real life. With Gogu’s help, we explore different aspects of a project manager’s life trying to find and suggest solutions easy to understand and to apply. As Gogu would say: “almost common sense”. We invite you to follow Gogu and send him your comments and suggestions.
Gogu suddenly got butterflies in his stomach. He revised the values one more time and even read the email hoping that somewhere, something was changed, that maybe he hadn’t properly understood the message.