Executable specifications are a way of using automated tests with the purpose of documenting the functionalities of an application. Automated tests are more and more used in the software industry, with the purpose of validating the correct functioning of an application. The validation implies of course a dialogue with the persons who formulate the requests (business analysts, product owners, product managers and other stakeholders) and the automated tests do not relieve us from documenting the ways the application is used. For documenting the functionalities there are some solutions, the most common one being writing specification documents.

Informatics and Computer Science academic programs in Romania often include courses like software engineering, software analysis and design, and project management. Despite the initial attractive appearance of these courses, students frequently become slightly disappointed in the end, or at least compared to other courses (e.g. programming languages, hardware, even physics, mathematics), the lectures are seen less interesting or useful. In reality, it’s not about the intrinsic lack that students have about these topics.

Adopting an agile approach for managing software projects is a journey, they say. This is the story of our team’s journey so far. Being a case study, it is neither an introduction to Scrum, nor a collection of best practices. Instead, I’m going to share with you the way we are applying Scrum.

A good teacher once told me: “If you need to do something more than twice, do something which will do it for you!” At first, I wasn’t at all convinced about the truth of his statement, but going through a few years of Computer Science, I started seeing it that way. The truth is that we, „the humans”, are truly bad at doing repetitive tasks. And so it should be – let’s let technology take care of that for us so we can enjoy the things which really matter.

In October 2011, we started the HackaServer Project, a web security testing platform using the power of crowd sourcing. When we were building HaS we had to come up with a way to create a spin off in case things were not moving in the direction that we anticipated. I have to mention that HaS is not open for business yet because of one simple reason: We are a very small team.

Bubble Witch Saga has 26 months since its initial launch on the Facebook platform and 16 months since its launch on the mobile market. Despite that, the game manages to maintain its position in Top 10 games on the Facebook platform and on mobile it remains the most popular game in the bubble shooters category, still receiving the best reviews and comments.

Meteor is an open-source platform for a much faster creation of web applications, no matter the experience level of the programmer. The moment you start a new project or you want to write your own web application is usually followed by the question: “Which is the most appropriate framework for my application?” Each programmer will have already formed an opinion in this respect.

Attila: Do you think that a generalist approach is something that can be sustained? For how long can it be sustained? Do we need to specialize in different subdomains?
Richard: I think the body of work has been large enough that we always needed specialists. There are too many skills to know, but each one has its role.

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.

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.