Trying to summarize hundreds of presentation slides and peer discussions from a [Gartner summit]() is a challenging task but it is worth trying, at least in order to share it and even generate debate around it. The topic addressed at one of the latest summits was the sourcing component of the Bimodal approach preached by Gartner – the adaptive sourcing model in the new era of Digital Business where companies strive to… well, innovate.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of meeting a very smart Top Manager, in my audience for a Workshop on **Cultural Differences**. He insisted that it is not correct to assume that people from one culture have the tendency to act in similar ways, while, at the same time, in different ways from people from another culture. From his point of view, it was all a matter of **Individual Personality**. I thought it would be interesting to share this with all of you.

In the last issue, we talked about the hardware and software innovations which led to a new product being released by the famous company based in Walldorf, namely SAP HANA . Now let us talk about how all these innovations, in addition to SAP HANA Studio, an IDE (Integrated Development Environment ) from SAP, help us reduce the implementation time of the projects and, of course, help us reduce the execution time of HANA-based applications.

As you well know, stormy clouds have recently swept across the European sky. The 23rd of June 2016 marked the Brexit referendum. Great Britain voted to leave the European Union (EU). Upon hearing the news, several people expressed their shock and anger, which was quickly covered by the media, the social media, the Internet and on TV. As a result, the political, financial, economic and social implications of Great Britain’s exit from the EU started to unfold. All led to a bleak prognosis. The juridical implications soon followed.

Gemini Solutions is a company that develops IT solutions for start-ups and for public companies in Silicon Valley and Western Europe. The company chose to get involved in cultural projects such as Dacian Statues. We interviewed Alexandra Bodea, the project coordinator.

Agile projects are not successful if the process attached to the Agile method is adhered to mechanically. The success of Agile projects lies in the quality of the team, in the way the team thinks and acts at an individual level. The way in which team members think and act is based on a common set of values. It looks simple enough. However, do we actually know how to interpret these values correctly?

The current paper comes in response to another paper which appeared in TSM, issue 47, namely , by Vasile Selegean . My colleague’s paper (further referred to as the original paper) made me feel uncomfortable and kept coming to my mind, mainly because the opinions expressed there conflict with my understanding of Scrum. Therefore, I would like to offer another perspective on the aspects raised by my colleague. I will also give an answer to the very same questions my colleague answers, without attempting to offer a full description of Scrum. My hope is for this widespread method in our community to receive a better understanding.

In this article we suggest to change the perspective on agility from a technical perspective to a more humanistic one, even a systemic one. First, the premises that we have taken into consideration when writing this article were the following:

As applications and systems grow larger and more complex, test automation is moving beyond a luxury and becoming a necessity for them. As technology changes, testing must also change and adapt. So start small, by using different approaches on a small scale to see what works best before attempting to spread further. Successful test automation needs both ingenuity and perseverance. What are the main factors that contribute to success in test automation? What common factors most often lead to the failure of an automation effort?