According to the Scrum Alliance, “Scrum is an Agile framework for completing complex projects. Scrum was originally formalized for software development projects, but it works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. The possibilities are endless. The Scrum framework is deceptively simple.

When we first started working on our project at work, we searched for an easy-to-use tool that would help us write readable and concise tests. We chose Spock, because in combination with Groovy it provided exactly what we needed: readable BDD-style tests that we could write fast and change easily. Keep in mind that Spock can also be used in combination with Java, but has a great synergy with Groovy. All the examples in this article are written in Groovy, but fear not! If you are a little bit familiar with Java, you will see that you can read Groovy code. Because our project’s tests examples would have been too complicated for a Spock introduction, I have chosen examples from a kata I coded to practice TDD.

“Self-discipline has a bigger impact on academic performance than intellectual talent” – This is the quote that may give us all, regular people, some hope that we can still accomplish great things, be the expert in our field of work or that the power to change is in fact in our own control.

First of all I should begin with what I do: I manage a 40+ IT consulting, training and software development company, and I work as trainer and consultant for customers in Romania and abroad, dealing mostly with Cloud technology.

After fifteen years working in IT, of which ten outside Romania, one of the major conclusions I have reached is that the work-life balance does not exist. In fact, I believe you have also reached this conclusion if you worked in the industry, even for a few months. What is this endless run for the doubtful concept turning into?

Customers are always on our minds and we often speak about how to keep them at the center of our attention at all times, about how to step in their shoes and how to win their hearts. However, we seldom do remember to also sharpen our blades for the fight against our worst enemy, our inner selves.

Have you ever found yourself scrutinizing old code you have written years before, realizing in hindsight how slow it actually was, how badly you have written it at the time and pondering how it managed to still work acceptably for such a long time? We did on more than one occasion… After a while, you can’t help but wonder what exactly saves you so often from your own stupidity. Could it be luck? Unlikely… And after many years we have finally figured it out. We know now what our guardian angel is. It’s the JVM, this smart, amazing machine, about which we Java programmers know so very little.

Indeed, this article should be about the WannaCry ransomware, but first let us do a small detour to an event that happened exactly ten days before the madness, and let’s talk about the GoogleDocs phishing wave. The scary thing is that, while in the case of WannaCry the “only” human factor was the lack of even basic actions to protect the systems, in the case of the phishing attack the user was actually required to click twice: once to open a link in a strange mail, and once to allow some suspicious website access to their Google account.

Custom software developers sometimes anxiously wait for the maintenance period to begin. During maintenance, the software is already locally installed on the customer’s equipment and infrastructure, and the detailed job of adapting the software to the customer’s processes and needs is in almost all respects finished. If the development and implementation phases were well managed and finalized, during the maintenance phase, the software developer’s effort should be significantly diminished and the profitability should increase. With a little luck (or maybe it’s more than luck at stake), during maintenance, the developer’s work and allotted resources will be minimum, while the maintenance cost (some quite generous) will compensate for the low profitability of the project in earlier phases.