tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86659787895396528112024-03-13T15:42:00.195-07:00i.b. phoolenThe most accurate and informative source of information about software development and enterprise IT in the entire universeI.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-1519968639297729622012-04-01T09:44:00.001-07:002012-04-01T09:45:47.020-07:00Announcing the ALAN2012 Conference!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYo7Cgdx_AMHl7kKGoTvPhAvuDHh-FmTjfL_dTXDc14-s1FOweW6oXdXAGAm8Nnne7Aux_YAOsastB71xllyIuh7PRsaO_icX6H52bWYdPyvtUDKtrWV2sqHba6XIo_duiyyq5s1zUbHBa/s1600/ALAN2012.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 295px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYo7Cgdx_AMHl7kKGoTvPhAvuDHh-FmTjfL_dTXDc14-s1FOweW6oXdXAGAm8Nnne7Aux_YAOsastB71xllyIuh7PRsaO_icX6H52bWYdPyvtUDKtrWV2sqHba6XIo_duiyyq5s1zUbHBa/s400/ALAN2012.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5726474496904514962" border="0" /></a>I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-18758640818606104872011-04-01T08:59:00.001-07:002011-04-01T08:59:56.406-07:00Agile tablets in the cloudRead all about them, my fine furry friends!<br /><br /><a href="http://www.sdtimes.com/link/35411">http://www.sdtimes.com/link/35411</a>I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-63299310795226969902010-04-01T15:58:00.000-07:002010-05-17T15:59:31.894-07:00RAG unveils Mystic Sextant<span style="font-weight: bold;">Palo Alto, Calif., April 1 – The Reliable Analyst Group has unveiled a new system designed to model the software industry. Designed for use by software development managers and investors, the new system, dubbed the “Mystic Sextant,” is said to offer uniform standards for accurately assessing disparate technology vendors.</span><br /><br />The heart of the Mystic Sextant is a six-dimensional hypersphere that graphs key performance indicators for technology companies using a variety of metrics, explained Buffy DeJour, principal analyst for RAG, who is also associate professor of n-space mathematics at CalTech and part-time Santa Monica lifeguard.<br /><br />“The log-log axes on each of the six dimensions makes it super-duper-easy for buyers and investors to compare each of the technology offerings in a specific market segment,” she said. “Anyone can use the model, as long as you can visualize and mentally transform a Euclidean space in which 6-polytopes and 5-spheres are constructed. Like, who can’t do that? Totally!”<br /><br />Long-range perspective, operational efficiency and commitment to purchasing RAG’s comprehensive consulting services are three of the Mystic Sextant axes, said DeJour. The others are the depth of the company’s net cash balance, percentage of budget devoted to research and development, and percentage of annual budget used to hire RAG analysts to author white papers and host Webcasts, she explained.<br /><br />The Mystic Sextant system is both transparent and facilitates comparisons of competing technology and vendors, said J. Marcus Wellington-Smythe IV, senior design pattern expert at the Institute for Software Behavioral Studies, who helped formally prove the theoretical mathematical underpinnings of the model. “It’s foolproof!” he said.<br /><br />When asked about the metrics based on a technology company’s commitment to buying RAG services, DeJour said, “The ‘RAG Spend’ axes are key to understanding the Mystic Sextant 5-sphere, which you might also know as a hypersphere in six dimensions. Quantifying how much a company is willing to spend with RAG demonstrates management’s long-range vision and their ability to execute on that vision. As if they could execute vision without our help. Like, seriously.”<br /><br />DeJour is writing a book explaining the industry modeling system, “Mystic Sextants and Six-Dimensional Hyperspheres for Dummies.”<br /><br />The biggest challenge facing RAG, said Wellington-Smythe, is finding the appropriate technology for disseminating the Mystic Sextant results to clients. “It’s not easy to accurately reproduce a 5-sphere in a PDF,” he sighed, “and current browser-based AJAX controls are sadly lacking.” The analyst firm hopes to have the problem solved shortly, said DeJour. “Totally!”I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-82966184122233285722010-04-01T15:57:00.000-07:002010-05-17T15:58:04.056-07:00Mac developers embrace .NET with Visual Objective-C<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bellevue, Wash., April 1 – Declaring a “bright new day for our friends in Macintosh-Land,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today unveiled Visual Studio 2010 for Mac OS X, expected to be available this summer.</span><br /><br />Speaking to a full crowd at the Meydenbauer Center, Ballmer reminded the audience that Microsoft is one of the oldest and most competitive ISVs for Apple’s Macintosh platform. The company’s Excel spreadsheet software first appeared for the Mac in 1985, he bellowed, two full years before Microsoft released a Windows version. “We never stopped loving the Mac,” he shouted, waving an iPhone. “Every day, our Windows 7 dev team is inspired by the great work being done by the visionaries in Cupertino.”<br /><br />Standing in front of a giant poster of the new Visual Studio for Mac OS X, his voice hoarse with emotion, Ballmer screamed, “Now it’s time to give something back!”<br /><br />The centerpiece of Visual Studio for Mac OS X is Visual Objective-C, a native implementation of Apple’s preferred object-oriented programming language, which is used on both Mac OS X and the iPhone SDK. According to Ballmer, Visual Objective-C will also appear in Visual Studio 2010 SP1 for Windows. Applications written in the Smalltalk-inspired language will require only a simple recompile to run on both Mac and Windows 7 systems, he said.<br /><br />Playing to the cheering developers attending the software launch, Ballmer then showed Visual Basic for Mac OS X, another component of the Visual Studio for Mac OS X suite. “You asked for it, you got it!” he shrieked, before being buried by an avalanche of rose petals and hotel room keys tossed by ISVs and industry analysts.<br /><br />Ballmer said that the Visual Studio for Mac OS X suite (expected to ship by Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, coming to San Francisco June 8–12) is designed to woo developers from Apple’s Xcode. “I know you love your Xcode,” he roared, “but I promise you’ll love your Visual Studio for Mac even more!”<br /><br />On-stage demonstrations at the event included Macintosh integration with Visual Studio Team System; using Visual Studio with Apple’s iPhone SDK to build a voice-recognition spreadsheet application for iPhone and iPad; and porting BioShock 2 from Windows to Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” Ballmer sheepishly apologized for the tool chain’s lack of support for versions of Mac OS X prior to 10.5 “Leopard,” saying, “We’re only human, okay?”<br /><br />As he was leaving the stage, Ballmer turned back. “Oh, just one more thing,” he cried—and then showed off the company’s full .NET Framework 4.0 for Mac OS X, available for free download from the Microsoft website. “We love you, Apple!” he whooped, bringing the event to a triumphant close.I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-25440135801437556712009-04-01T05:15:00.000-07:002010-03-09T05:17:57.726-08:00The Latest News Briefs...Microsoft released <span style="font-weight: bold;">Windows Azure Home Edition</span> for the growing number of consumers with enough desktops, laptops, netbooks, set-top boxes, game consoles and smartphones to create their own teraflop computing cloud. The software will be a direct upgrade from Windows Vista Ultimate with Windows Media Center...<br /><br />Technology analyst firm Gartner has been named to a <span style="font-weight: bold;">Gartner Magic Quadrant</span> for its leadership in technology analysis. “This validates that Gartner has both the ability to execute and also the completeness of vision to lead in the technology analysis market,” said a spokesperson...<br /><br />To the owner of the <span style="font-weight: bold;">blue Toyota Camry</span> in the back parking lot: Your headlights are on...<br /><br />Intel demonstrated a new massively parallel version of its <span style="font-weight: bold;">64-bit Itanium processor</span>, the first using Intel’s new 8nm Nebuchadnezzar architecture, which succeeds the Montecito, Montvale, Tukwila, Poulson and Kittson architectures. With 512 cores, peak interprocessor bandwidth of 12 TB/sec and peak memory bandwidth of 640 TB/sec, it is the fastest chip ever designed, and is literally decades ahead of anything you can do with an x86-64 processor. Analysts agree, however, that Nebuchadnezzar is not expected to gain many new customers for the slow-selling Itanium platform; nobody even showed up for the demo...<br /><br />Social network giants <span style="font-weight: bold;">Facebook</span> and <span style="font-weight: bold;">LinkedIn</span> announced a merger. The new company, <span style="font-weight: bold;">FacedInLinkBook</span>, helps professionals share their most embarrassing college party videos with customers and prospective employers. Terms of the merger were not disclosed, pending the new company’s appearance in a Gartner Magic Quadrant...<br /><br />Congratulation, your <span style="font-weight: bold;">EMAIL ID</span> have won 1,820,000 GBP. winning No: 10 20 25 41 44 46 with a bonus 6 for LOTTO 6/49 in the just concluded draw held in United Kingdom. please contact your Agent...<br /><br />Big-brained computer engineers and software scientists from 154 countries attended the <span style="font-weight: bold;">Rebooting Rebooting Summit</span>, held in San Francisco last month. The purpose of the summit was to put our planet’s most brilliant minds onto the biggest unanswered question of our age: Why does it take so long for your computer to turn itself off when you select Shut Down from the Start menu?I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-85882233297713066282009-04-01T05:14:00.000-07:002010-03-09T05:15:21.596-08:00Passive-Aggressive Design PatternsSoftware engineers work with dozens of design patterns, but research shows that the most commonly encountered is the Passive-Aggressive Design Pattern. Known for its frustratingly obstructionist behavior, this design pattern can appear anywhere, but is most often found in applications deployed into unpleasant application servers or hostile data centers.<br /><br />“This is one instance where some software definitely doesn’t play well with others,” said J. Marcus Wellington-Smythe IV, senior design pattern expert at the Institute for Software Behavioral Studies, speaking at a conference on April 1. “You code the module to execute a certain task or to carry out an operation using a specific algorithm, but instead you find that the module quietly just refuses to do its job.”<br /><br />According to Wellington-Smythe, applications created using the Passive-Aggressive Design Pattern can be recognized by their many excuses about why things didn’t work out, as well as sincere assurances that things will be better next time. “You’ll see in the log that a buffer was full, or that there was a single-bit parity error. Perhaps a checksum didn’t match or network packets didn’t arrive. It doesn’t matter. There’s always something. The reality is that the routine doesn’t want to do its function, but won’t admit it to the CPU.”<br /><br />In parallel-computing systems, the design pattern has been used to build multithreaded applications, with predictable results, says Wellington-Smythe. “Too often, a supervisor dispatches a thread to a core…and the thread simply never comes back, or returns much later without a good explanation and without the expected return code,” he said. “The supervisor might not even realize that the thread was simply stalling, just running out the clock.”<br /><br />Wellington-Smythe pointed to a recent instance, where the Passive-Aggressive Design Pattern was used to architect a garbage collector for a virtual machine monitor. “Do you think that the garbage ever got collected? Yeah, right,” he moaned. “We had deallocated memory blocks everywhere, sitting around waiting to be picked up. You might call it learned helplessness, but all we heard from the collector was to trust it, it would get around to the task ‘soon.’ What a mess.”<br /><br />Unfortunately, says Wellington-Smythe, once the Passive-Aggressive Design Pattern is in an application framework, no amount of refactoring will improve the software’s erratic behavior. “You can debug and profile and root-cause analyze until you’re blue in the face, but there’s no long-term cure,” he said. “It’s enough to drive you to abstraction.”I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-1868435248928997132009-04-01T05:11:00.000-07:002010-03-09T05:12:24.868-08:00Taking software development on faithTOPEKA, KANSAS, APRIL 1 – Speakers here at the Faith-Based Development Conference have demonstrated a software development methodology based on the concept that if you believe the code will work properly, it <span style="font-style: italic;">will</span> work properly.<br /><br />“All you have to do is believe, and we do this all the time,” said Ebenezer Scroom, CEO of Faith-Based Software Development Inc. (FBSDI), which sponsored the conference. “We turn the car key and believe that our engine will start… and it does. We push bread down into the toaster and believe that toast will pop out… and it does. We write thousand of lines of C# or Java, click the ‘Build’ button and believe the application will execute correctly the first time. In his heart of hearts, every developer believes this! The good news is that if you follow the principles of Faith-Based Development, your app <span style="font-style: italic;">will</span> work the first time.”<br /><br />Scroom cited anecdotal studies that demonstrate the power of Faith-Based Development to cut costs, shorten development cycles, improve software quality, and so on. “These results have been validated by industry analysts,” he said, “who were duly impressed when we hired them to author white papers and conduct webinars for FBSDI.”<br /><br />There are four pillars of Faith-Based Development, explained Scroom, all of which can be easily implemented by tools sold by FBSDI. A project begins with Faith-Based Modeling, where architects use UML to document what Scroom calls “Faith Cases.”<br /><br />Next, Faith-Based Coding relies on plug-in modules for Visual Studio Team System and Eclipse. “If you have faith that your syntax is right, then it’s going to be right,” he said.<br /><br />The third phase is Faith-Based Testing. “This is perhaps the easiest part to learn.” Scroom said. “Developers are used to firing up their automated test suites, closing their eyes and praying. What we now know is that it’s the quality of the prayer, not the comprehensiveness of the test harness, that really matters.”<br /><br />Finally, he said, it’s time for FBSDI’s Faith-Based Build and Deployment Services to bring together the final assemblies and push them out to the data center in one irrevocable operation.<br /><br />“If you believe the software will be perfect the first time, there’s no reason to implement a phased rollout,” Scroom said. “If you have faith, you will succeed. If not… have I mentioned our professional services division?”I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-35271220231695645272009-04-01T05:08:00.000-07:002010-03-09T05:12:38.081-08:00CLOUDBASIC opens computing paradigm to students, MindyDARTMOUTH, N.H., APRIL 1 — Hearkening back to the earliest days of computing education, a team of computer scientists have developed a special programming language to help students learn how to create mashups in the cloud. The language, CLOUDBASIC, was unveiled at Dartmouth College, home of the original version of BASIC.<br /><br />“It’s been 47 years since John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz showed off Dartmouth BASIC,” said Sara dePragma, a graduate student involved with the programming initiative as part of her Masters in Computer Education. “Heck, I wasn’t even born then. Come to think of it, neither were my parents. Sheesh!”<br /><br />According to dePragma, the eight design principles of CLOUDBASIC are:<br /><br />1. Be so easy that total losers like her roommate Mindy could use it.<br />2. Be a general-purpose programming language suitable to use as both a dessert topping and a floor wax.<br />3. Allow advanced features to be added for experts (which, duh, would make the language unusable by Mindy).<br />4. Be interactive using things called “dialog boxes.”<br />5. Provide clear and friendly error messages when a rogue program brings down the entire cloud environment.<br />6. Respond quickly for small programs, such as “Hello, Cloud.”<br />7. Not to require an understanding of the cloud’s hardware, unless the server is using an AMD processor.<br />8. Shield the user from the cloud, because the cloud is very big and ethereal.<br /><br />Prof. Angus McMushroom, dePragma’s advisor, was quick to point out that the use of the GOTO statement within CLOUDBASIC was not his idea. “It’s not my idea,” he insisted. “I just know that nothing good’s going to come of it. I can just imagine that Ed Dijkstra’s turning in his grave. Just don’t blame me, okay?”<br /><br />At the Dartmouth announcement, representatives of major cloud and industry players were present to pledge their support for the language:<br /><br />• Microsoft released the first Community Technology Preview of CloudBasic#.NET for Windows Azure and the unannounced Visual Studio Team System Cloud Edition 2012.<br /><br />• Sun announced that the Java Community Process would begin a JSR to develop with a language that’s similar to CloudBasic#.NET, except incompatible in a few subtle ways, and which would be implemented in NetBeans.<br /><br />• The Eclipse Foundation is trying hard to come up with an acronym for their own CLOUDBASIC project, which it says will have OSGi extensions that will render it subtly incompatible with what Microsoft and Sun are doing.<br /><br />• Apple has released iCLOUDBASIC, available in the iTunes App Store as a US$0.99 download.<br /><br />• Google showed off the public beta of Google CLOUDBASIC Web Services, which are expected to remain in public beta for the next 20 years.<br /><br />• Amazon.com invited SD Times readers to purchase the Kindle version of “CLOUDBASIC for Total Losers Like Mindy” at a 25% discount. Use the code MINDYISALOSER at checkout.<br /><br />• The Free Software Foundation released an angry statement warning that it and the Software Freedom Law Center will sue any organization that doesn’t refer to the language as either GNU/CLOUDBASIC or as gcb.<br /><br />“I’m so delighted to see everyone adopting CLOUDBASIC,” said Dartmouth’s dePragma. “Now, who’s up for helping me design its debugger for my Ph.D. dissertation? Mindy?”I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-41886076334079888512008-04-17T10:19:00.001-07:002008-04-17T10:21:20.778-07:00This one's for you, Zephyr!Letters! Letters from fans! They love me, as you can see in this e-mail that came in today. This is the best message that I've received this decade.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Hi,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">We came across your "i.b. phoolen" blog and appreciate the informative content you have there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">We have just launched Zephyr which is a next generation Test Management System and wanted to introduce you to it by providing an exclusive look. Here's a live demo link – <a href="http://demo.yourzephyr.com">http://demo.yourzephyr.com</a> – and there you'll be able to interact with the system anytime. We've loaded it with sample data to facilitate any product reviews. You'll find other assets (screenshots etc.) on the Media section of our main website – <a href="http://www.getzephyr.com">http://www.getzephyr.com</a>.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Zephyr is a slick, feature rich and affordable Test Management System aimed at global SME, IT Departments and Testing Vendors. It brings a whole bunch of innovation in a space that has lacked it for the longest time. We'd like to draw your attention particularly to our customized Testing Desktops, real time Collaboration and Live Reporting via slick Dashboards as well as a host of Web 2.0 features.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">We are test engineers ourselves and have designed and built Zephyr based on multiple years of real world experience. Your feedback or a mention on your blog would be very interesting to your readership while being a source of encouragement to us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Thanks,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Sean Stewart</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">sean.stewart@getzephyr.com</span><br /><a href="http://www.getzephyr.com"><span style="font-style: italic;">http://www.getzephyr.com</span></a>I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-56127629619483719112008-04-01T15:03:00.000-07:002009-03-31T15:14:39.767-07:00The Software Tester’s Bill of RightsSoftware testers are people too! Many of my best friends are software testers, and I can guarantee that they are people. In many countries, people have rights. Well, not everyone has rights. Airline travelers don’t have any rights, as we all know. Celebrities don’t have any rights. Neither do people who talk loudly on cell phones in restaurants or on the subway.<br /><br />The reason why people talk loudly on cell phones is a design flaw, by the way. If the people who designed cell phones wanted to make friends, they’d program the phones to drop the call if the caller is being too noisy. Hey, rude people, mobile phones have sensitive microphones. You don’t have to shout!<br /><br />Okay, we’ve established that airline travelers, celebrities and cell-phone abusers don’t have rights. What about the rest of us? We have rights, and that goes double for software testers. You know, testers take it in the shorts most of the time. The customer changed his mind after seeing the beta, and testers have to catch the variances. The architect messed up the caching algorithms? Testers have to account for nondeterministic behavior. The programmers spent too much time playing foosball? Test cycles get compressed. A line-of-business manager decided to release the software early? Test cycles get compressed. An end user found a bug? Testers get blamed for missing it.<br /><br />Good people, it’s time we fight back with our very own Software Tester’s Bill of Rights. I know that you’re asking yourself, “What a brilliant idea. But who would write this Bill of Rights for us?” Fear not, gentle software tester. I.B. Phoolen is more than happy to draft this important document on your behalf. And now, without further ado, I present: The Software Tester’s Bill of Rights.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1. The Right to Own the Requirements</span><br /><br />A tester’s job is to ensure that software meets requirements. Where do those requirements come from? Some from the customer. Some from the architect. There’s the problem.<br /><br />Many of those requirements are obtuse, poorly written or plainly misguided. Those user stories — c’mon, folks. Don’t you have any imagination? Those performance and reliability metrics — you’ve got to be kidding, that throughput will never fly on a real-world network.<br /><br />No wonder there are so many defects found by the test team, no wonder the overpaid programmers take so long to get the job done, no wonder the entire project is over budget.<br /><br />Fortunately, we testers know better. We know what’s a good requirement, and what’s totally lame. Let us fine-tune the specs. Let us control the specs. If we disagree with a feature request, let us revise it or delete it.<br /><br />If the test team owns the specs, we can guarantee that our tests will show that the application meets those specs on time, on budget, blah blah blah. Guess what? It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">2. The Right to Kill the Project</span><br /><br />That’s right. If the requirements are sufficiently moronic, or if we think the project is silly or necessary, we’re going to axe it. I.B. calls that “improving ROI.”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">3. The Right to Choose Our Own Test Tools</span><br /><br />Everyone talks about how developers are creative free spirits, who should be able to use the tool chain of their choice. If some programmers want to use Visual Studio or the IBM Software Platform, that’s fine with their managers. If Bob wants to run JBuilder, that’s fine too. If Sally wants to run Eclipse, nobody objects. If some show-offs eschew IDEs altogether to write the entire application with vi, lint, gcc and some duct tape, more power to them.<br /><br />Meanwhile, C-level executive bozos want to standardize the quality assurance suites to embrace new flash-in-the-pan paradigms like “test automation” and “test driven development. They insist that testers use uniform tools and bug tracking applications, or — heaven help us — “ALM suites.”<br /><br />Bullfeathers. Testers are just as creative as developers, as you can tell by reviewing my recent expense reports. We demand a generous budget so we can choose our own tools. As far as I’m concerned, every tester has an unalienable right to adopt the defect management system of his or her own choice, even if it’s Excel. If the CIO and VP of IT don’t like it, well, that’s their problem, bunky.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">4. The Right to Employ Agile Methods</span><br /><br />Preferably, those agile methods would be demonstrated by a perky aerobics instructor wearing a torn sweatshirt and leggings like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">5. The Right to Determine Release Schedules</span><br /><br />I’ve had it up to here with test cycles being compressed due to boneheaded requirements, flawed architectures or nitwit coders who wouldn’t know an unchecked buffer if it bit them in the nose.<br /><br />I don’t care if you’re rushing the product out to meet some contractual guarantee or the holiday shopping season. Under this Bill of Rights, any tester — any tester — can push back the release schedule at any time, with or without cause, and there ain’t nuthin’ you can do about it. If a line worker’s power to halt the production line improves the quality of Japanese cars, then by gum it works for software too.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">6. The Right to Blame Microsoft for Everything</span><br /><br />Self-evident.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">7. The Right to Blame Open Source Software for Everything</span><br /><br />Self-evident.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">8. The Right to Redefine the IT Org Chart</span><br /><br />In some organizations, development and test are peers. In others organizations, testers report into the development organization. Both of those models are flawed.<br /><br />The only reason that companies hire architects and developers is to create applications for the test team to test.<br /><br />Therefore,<span style="font-style: italic;"> ipso facto</span>, development is a subset of the test organization, and should be treated as such. That means that all developers work for the test organization. And, of course, all testers get paid more than developers, and get all the best parking spaces.<br /><br />Take that, coding prima donnas. Who’s your daddy now?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">9. The Right to Wear a Badge and Uniform</span><br /><br />Heck, if we’re going to be the Quality Police, we might as well look the part. That’s especially important when doing Fuzz Testing.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">10. The Right to a Whopping Pay Raise</span><br /><br />If it’s good enough for politicians and CEOs, it’s good enough for software testers: We work hard, so we demand a bigger piece of the pie. Cash is good, but we’d like a generous serving of backdated stock options, too. Oh, while you’re up, could you grab my cell phone? I need to call Jennifer Beals. Thanks.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Retired software engineer I.B. Phoolen lives in Southern California, where he regularly frolics. He rarely updates his blog at <a href="http://ibphoolen.blogspot.com/">ibphoolen.blogspot.com</a>.</span>I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-82007503499844525242008-04-01T14:59:00.000-07:002009-03-31T15:05:45.400-07:00High-Tech Industry Consolidation Continues<span style="font-weight: bold;">SAN FRANCISCO, APRIL 1, 2018 –</span> Tsunami waves of consolidation continue to break against the software industry, as MicroCiscoYahooOraclesoft announced a US$2.4 trillion takeover of IBMhpSAPemc. Meanwhile, Apple Telephone & Telegraph agreed to merge with GoogledellSUNokia in a deal worth $3.7 trillion.<br /><br />“This is a fantastic day for consumers everywhere,” shouted Steve Ballmer, chairman of MicroCiscoYahooOraclesoft. “Ever since the last anti-trust restrictions were lifted from our company yesterday, we began looking for new ways to innovate and bring more choice to customers. This acquisition goes a long way toward bringing us closer to Bill’s dream of ‘information at your fingertips across the road ahead at the speed of thought,’ or as I like to say it, IAYFATRA@TSOT.”<br /><br />While critics swiftly charged that the MicroCiscoYahooOraclesoft move is all about increasing its share of Internet-based advertising, comments from a pay-for-praise analyst hint at a bigger target: mainframe consolidation and positioning Big Iron as next-generation smart clients. Noting that current mainframes rival mobile phones in size, the ability to combine the technologies in new, exciting ways creates powerful synergies, said Ivan A. Suckup, director of The Suckup Group.<br /><br />“Imagine a pocket-sized IBM mainframe running Microsoft operating systems and Oracle databases, combining HP’s consumer marketing prowess with SAP’s business back-end integration, EMC’s storage technology, Cisco’s connectivity and Yahoo’s leading-edge ad-delivery platform,” Suckup said. “If they can only solve the cooling problem, and get more than three milliseconds of battery life from the fuel cell, this will truly be the killer platform of the future.”<br /><br />The Suckup Group recently placed MicroCiscoYahooOraclesoft into its Golden Sector of Industry Innovation & Leadership™. “They’re our best client,” gushed Suckup, “and they subscribe to every one of our overpriced services. However, that in no way is related to our upgrading our honest, impartial recommendation to ‘Buy all their stock that you can afford, even if you have to clean out your kid’s college fund and take out another mortgage on your house.’ ”<br /><br />In related news: Two months after MicroCiscoYahooOraclesoft completed its controversial acquisition of Red Hat, questions linger about the accidental loss of all of Red Hat’s source code, revealed only last week. “Whoops,” said Darl McBride, director of open-source strategy at MicroCiscoYahooOraclesoft. “Don’t know how that happened. Pity all the backup tapes were destroyed, too.”<br /><br />McBride pointed out that MicroCiscoYahooOraclesoft’s Server Customer Open Source program, or SCOsource, will offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux users discounts to license Microsoft’s Windows Server 2016 through May 15. After that, the company will remotely disable all Red Hat Linux installations. “We suggest you read the fine print,” McBride suggested, “and give up Linux before it’s too late.”<br /><br />“We agree with that,” agreed The Suckup Group’s Suckup.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">AT&T Goes the Distance</span><br /><br />On a roll since its 2015-2017 acquisitions of Sony, The New York Times, Starbucks, Disney and Wind River, Apple Telephone & Telegraph surprised Wall Street by agreeing to be purchased by software giant GoogledellSUNokia for $3.7 trillion.<br /><br />“The combination of our companies will be an unstoppable force for doing no evil,” said Eric Schmidt, chairman of GoogledellSUNokia. “We already have the world’s largest server farms, the most mature direct-sales model, the most online advertising, the best Android-powered handsets, the best embedded operating system, and the most complete logs about everything you do on the Internet. Plus, with gJava, you can write everything once, and run it everywhere. With AT&T’s resources, we’ll have even more amazingly cool handsets, the hottest personal computers, the most reliable wireless network and the most compelling content for you and your family, at home and at work. GoogledellSUNokia truly is the happiest place on Earth.”<br /><br />Steve Jobs, chairman of AT&T, will remain on as honorary spokesmodel and chief platform evangelist for the combined company, to be named GoogledellSUNokiAT&T. During Macworld 2018, webcast from San Francisco’s Moscone Center last month, the normally recalcitrant Jobs had hinted that something big was brewing.<br /><br />After unveiling the iPod notouch — the first music player with direct audio/video brain-feed capabilities — Jobs said “Something big is brewing.” At the time, analysts believed he was promoting the new AT&T Friends and Family Plan, which gives you 600 anytime iTunes movie rentals along with unlimited TV episode downloads nights and weekends, if you sign up for a two-year WiMax contract. For a limited time, each new subscriber also receives a Duetto Visa card, a Magic Kingdom three-day pass and home download of the Sunday Times. Severe penalties apply for early contract termination.<br /><br />Perhaps Jobs had more than Mickey Mocha in mind, said Suckup of The Suckup Group, which recently placed both AT&T and GoogledellSUNokia into its Golden Sector of Industry Innovation & Leadership™. “When Jobs smiled after asking ‘Just one more thing: Don’t you love Google?’ at the end of his keynote, clearly something big was brewing,” Suckup said.<br /><br />While GoogledellSUNokia’s Schmidt declined to discuss specific plans until the merger is rubber-stamped by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Union, he did say, “Someday soon, every phone will be an iPhone,” and hinted that one could expect to see Dell PCs, Sun servers and Nokia handsets appearing for sale in every iBucks location.<br /><br />“Turning every Apple retail store into a Starbucks coffee shop, and every neighborhood Starbucks into an Apple store, was inspired,” said Suckup. “Getting a fresh iced latte from the iBucks Genius Barista while you download some tunes, upgrade your RAM, do your homework and work through some technical issues with GarageBand — that’s the ultimate in 21st-century convenience.”<br /><br />Suckup continued, “If that level of service is extended to supporting Windows Panorama Edition 2017, that could give MicroCiscoYahooOraclesoft the much-needed opportunity to reclaim some market share from the iMac. Hey, that’s another reason to buy some stock.”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Stay Tuned</span><br /><br />The three remaining high-tech companies that have not yet been acquired or merged — Novell, Borland and Salesforce.com — are reportedly thinking about it.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Retired software engineer I.B. Phoolen invented Web services, Scrum, penicillin, recursion and, most recently, ALGOL 68. Read his blog at <a href="http://ibphoolen.blogspot.com">ibphoolen.blogspot.com</a>.</span>I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-61989237415007532432007-04-01T19:21:00.000-07:002008-02-24T19:22:27.220-08:00Code Blue!<span style="font-weight: bold;">How do you rank the severity of application defects? Some test teams assign severity/priority scores, but that’s arbitrary, and doesn’t reflect the real-world impact of bugs. How can you really assess the importance of something that’s rated “medium” for severity but “low” for priority?</span><br /><br />More practical dev teams use expressions to communicate, through the defect database, change-management system, email or sticky notes, how important a defect is to the team. “This one’s a show stopper,” you might say. Or “If you can fix this before the next release, that would be great,” you might comment. Or “Who cares about a teeny-weeny typo?” you might write. Or “Sheesh, this one’s definitely gonna get us sued,” you might opine. Isn’t that better than “high,” “medium” and “low”?<br /><br />However creative that approach is, the expression-based defect ranking system does leave things to interpretation. One person’s “it’s a teeny-weeny typo” is someone else’s “clean out your desk and be out of here before the cops come,” especially if that typo was in your CEO’s name, or in one of the digits in your upcoming Securities and Exchange Commission filing.<br /><br />Similarly: While your CFO might issue a scathing four-letter expletive in both cases, which is worse: a bug that applies the wrong algorithms to stock-options pricing, or a bug that applies the wrong algorithms to a credit-scoring system? Selecting the “we’re totally screwed” button in the issue-defect system’s severity/priority may not accurately communicate the CFO’s displeasure.<br /><br />The right solution, as I’m sure you will agree, is to hand these sorts of things to the U.S. Government. No, not the actually grading of your software’s bugs, you silly person: that’s <span style="font-style: italic;">your</span> job, and you can’t get out of it. No, we should take a leaf from how our benevolent authorities have responded to airport security. You don’t hear the public address system at the airport say, “We’re at terror level we’re-going-to-die.” That would cause panic. Worse, it is ambiguous, since it doesn’t communicate who is going to die, when this will take place, and if you have time to buy a $5 Bloody Mary from a flight attendant beforehand.<br /><br />Instead, as I’m sure you know, the monotone announcement on the P.A. system says something like, <span style="font-style: italic;">“Attention: We are at Homeland Security Threat Condition Orange.”</span> This is more practical, and more useful, because it’s from the government and they know best.<br /><br />That, my friends, is the model that software test/QA professionals should use when communicating with end users and other stakeholders about bugs, when assessing the bugs for ourselves, and when classifying said bugs in the defect database.<br /><br />“Hey, Bob, looks like we’ve got a nice, juicy Yellow here,” you might hear shouted over a cubicle. “Are you sure it’s not Orange? We’re only fixing Oranges before the next beta,” you might shout back. And so-on and so-on.<br /><br />The U.S. Government’s colorful Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS) was enacted in March 2002. Forget about those silly “low,” “medium” and “high” scales that you see so often in defect-management systems: the HSAS goes much farther with <span style="font-style: italic;">five</span> levels:<br /><br />Red = Severe: Severe Risk of Terrorist Attacks<br />Orange = High: High Risk of Terrorist Attacks<br />Yellow = Elevated: Significant Risk of Terrorist Attacks<br />Blue = Guarded: General Risk of Terrorist Attacks<br />Green = Low: Low Risk of Terrorist Attacks<br /><br />Brilliant, brilliant, I can hear you saying. Go ahead, say it again. Brilliant. Thank you. You can see instantly why this is appropriate for software development and test/QA. I would humbly propose the following scale for categorizing software threats. Actually, I would like to propose two scales, which I call the Software Defect Advisory System (SDAS). The first SDAS scale is the one that you tell your end users, managers and other stakeholders about, and which they use for reporting bugs to your test team:<br /><br />Red = Severe: This Must Be Fixed Immediately<br />Orange = High: This Should Be Fixed Soon<br />Yellow = Elevated: Fix This When You Can<br />Blue = Guarded: Fix This Sometime, Maybe<br />Green = Low: Just Thought You Should Know<br /><br />The other SDAS scale, of course, is more important, because it’s the one you use to categorize actionable issues in the defect database:<br /><br />Red = Severe: This Will Get You Fired<br />Orange = High: This Probably Will Get You Fired<br />Yellow = Elevated: This Might Get You Fired<br />Blue = Guarded: This Probably Won’t Get You Fired<br />Green = Low: This Is Just Stupid<br /><br />Follow this system, my friend, and you’ll never get scolded for misspelling the CEO’s name, or miscalculating stock option prices, ever ever again.I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-77179763078208607222007-04-01T19:13:00.000-07:002010-03-09T06:53:12.305-08:00Bite Vulnerabilities Before They Bite You<span style="font-weight: bold;">April 1, 2007 —</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Firewalls are great if you’re worried about barbarians attacking your front gate. Intrusion detection systems are fine, if your goal is to see if unauthorized traffic is on your LAN; intrusion prevention systems work in conjunction with your firewall to block that unauthorized traffic.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Bah. </span>Firewalls, IDS and IPS systems, as well as anti-virus solutions, spam filters, worm detectors — they’re all worthless, absolutely worthless, when it comes to attacking the real causes of software security failures. So, too, are checks against buffer overflows, cross-site scripting and SQL injection. While those vulnerabilities can trip up an unwary programmer, they’re easy to catch. Just about any static or dynamic code analyzer can find those problems. The real challenge is how to handle the most significant software security challenge of our time.<br /><br />Puppies.<br /><br />Yes, my fellow software architects, developers and test/QA professionals, the biggest threat to our software infrastructure, and the integrity of our data, is puppies. They look so cute, don’t they, with their lolling pink tongues, soft waggly ears and short little legs. They roll and play and want to be cuddled. But don’t be fooled. Puppies, those innocent little puppies, are placing your enterprise software in deadly peril… and your CEO, if the puppies start messing with your Sarbanes-Oxley systems. He’ll be going down the river… and you’ll be down there with him, if you don’t take action now.<br /><br />Where did this insidious threat come from? It’s hard to know. Perhaps the first puppies merely wanted some fun; they wanted to show off in front of their litter mates. Nobody picks on the runt, you see, if he can erase breeding records with the click of a mouse. But then things got worse. Government agencies and their espionage programs. The military. Commercial interests. Terrorists and rogue states. They learned how to use puppies to bypass virtual private networks, routers, firewalls. How in the face of a determined puppy, even 256-bit AES encryption is about as effective as an old, battered squeaky toy. Buffer overflow exploits? Ha. Puppies sneer at your pathetic algorithms; you might as well not bother.<br /><br />The puppy threat is years ahead of our technology. Check your Tivoli, your OpenView, your Unicenter TNG, even Microsoft’s MOM. Do any of them detect puppies? Not the latest versions, and not the current betas. Do they have any facilities for neutralizing the puppy threat, once detected? Not a chance. Microsoft Research, the T.J. Watson Laboratories — they’re hopeless. The experts at the Carnegie Mellon Computer Emergency Response Team are asleep at the switch. The Computer Security Institute doesn’t have a clue. Even the U.S. National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security lack contingency plans to protect our vital enterprise software from the puppy scourge.<br /><br />You should pool your resources with the rest of the IT team. Gather up your LAN and WAN managers, end-user support teams, data center managers, test teams. Heck, even bring the code librarian. Get the CIO or CTO to bring the team together — there’s no time to lose! Check out the RSA Conference or the Software Security Summit, neither of which (surprise) have classes or tutorials on puppy threat management. Ask, no, demand that they address this issue immediately We need classes. We need patches. We need an action plan!<br /><br />Puppies. This time, the rolled-up newspaper is not going to be enough. Let’s get to work, people, before it’s too late.I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-64344662370587165822006-04-01T15:35:00.000-08:002010-03-09T05:36:33.160-08:00Quality Ought To Hurt<span style="font-weight: bold;">It’s been seven years since the public cared about software quality. It’s been seven years since CEOs and CFOs, Joe Six-Pack and soccer moms, presidents and kings gave a moment’s thought to bugs and flaws.</span><br /><br />Seven years ago, remember, companies large and small were obsessed with the Year 2000 bug. Congress and the United Nations held hearings about it. The New York Times, Washington Post and Bangor Daily News ran stories about it. The Frankfurter Allgemeine, China People’s Daily, O Estado de S.Paula, and Vancouver Business Journal did, too.<br /><br />Within our industry, thousands of technical articles discussed best practices for swatting the Y2K bug. IBM and PriceWaterhouseCoopersLybrandEtc. mobilized armies of pinstriped consultants. Consumers panicked. Governments panicked. Companies, frightened about lawsuits, paid beaucoup bucks to recruit old COBOL and RPG programmers.<br /><br />Why was Y2K such a big deal? Because the consequences were made tangible.<br /><br />Riders would get stuck in elevators, we were told. Weapons systems would shut down. Airplanes would crash. People would die. Worse, businesses would get sued. Or so everyone thought — and this scared them into making a huge, if one-time, investment in software quality.<br /><br />Y2K came and went, and airplanes didn’t crash. Whether that’s because the bugs were bogus, or because those armies of consultants actually found and fixed flaws, I don’t know. But the truth remains: Governments, the media and consumers cared about software quality because the consequences were made real in terms of lives and dollars.<br /><br />Software quality can’t be an abstract concept. Think about engineering, where there’s a tremendous commitment to quality: If a bridge isn’t architected properly, it falls down and people die. If an anti-lock brake system has bugs, cars crash and people die. A software flaw in the first Ariane 5 rocket, launched in 1996, caused the loss of a $500 million satellite.<br /><br />Stories like those get people’s attention, if just for a little while.<br /><br />The U.S. government understands that the only way to get companies to do things is to enact real and severe penalties. You’ve probably heard the capsule summary of Sarbanes-Oxley: “Do it right or the CEO goes to jail.” The threat of going to jail gets people’s attention, too, if just for a little while. That’s why we’re going to need some SarbOx perp walks to keep this issue in the public eye.<br /><br />So, what does I.B. Phoolen recommend? Among other things, more visibility for software quality. Lots more visibility. Think about how the <a href="http://www.ntsb.gov/">U.S. National Transportation Safety Board</a> maintains an extensive database of aircraft accidents and near-accidents. This database, and the NTSB incident investigations, not only catch design flaws and defective aviation hardware/software, but also point to where aircraft operators, airports and maintenance crews don’t follow proscribed operating procedures.<br /><br />“Best practices,” you know, ain’t optional in the aerospace industry. Why are they in the software industry? What if companies were forced to divulge all software flaws publicly to a National Software Safety Board, and submit to external investigations? You can bet they’d pay a lot more attention to quality. If that NSSB could mandate software recalls, the way automobile and aircraft manufacturers can be forced to repair — at their own cost — product defects, wouldn’t we all be better off? What if Microsoft had to file a government incident report every time someone found a Windows bug?<br /><br />Transparency is a good start, but I.B. says that it’s not enough: Bugs ought to hurt, not just in the company’s cost to fix the bug, but in significant damages and penalties. I’m talking big fines. Didn’t check that buffer? $1,000 per buffer per user. Web site’s vulnerable to SQL injection? $50,000 per input field. Shipped products with known flaws? Didn’t catch an exception? Failed to certify the printer driver? $10,000 for each end user, thank you very much. Ka-ching!<br /><br />Penalties like those get people’s attention, and not just for a little while.<br /><br />Today, software quality for both enterprise and commercial software is left almost entirely up to the software maker to decide and address. Customers’ legal rights are often entirely abrogated by shrink-wrap software licenses and the fine print in Web site legal statements. If a bug in a commercial operating system or application costs you time and money, wipes out your data or shuts down your business — tough luck, kiddo, trying to recover anything in court. (With open-source software, at least you can try to spot flaws and fix them yourself.)<br /><br />We insist on transparency and penalties when it comes to cars, aerospace and civil engineering. We should demand that for software, too. The only way to force ISVs — and those allocating resources to enterprise software development and QA teams — to be serious about quality is through bad publicity, nasty fines and criminal penalties for violations. Didn’t check your return value to detect a null pointer? Buddy, tell it to the judge, tell it to the judge.I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-41452502180103521932005-04-01T17:08:00.000-08:002008-02-24T19:24:19.214-08:00The Case For Dysfunctional Testing<span style="font-weight: bold;">You testers, QA specialists, performance jockeys, you poor ISO 9001 efficiency experts—you’ve got it wrong. All wrong.</span><br /><br />All this talk about functional testing. It’s a load of hooey, and you know it.<br /><br />What’s the point of functional testing? You don’t want to know if your code functions.<br /><br />Your designers and architects are smart, they’ve listened to the end user and created some killer UML diagrams. The UI requirements are solid. Your programmers are top of the heap. Of course it functions. It’s just plain stupid to waste time and money, and mess up your delivery schedule, with so-called functional testing.<br /><br />What you want to perform is dysfunctional testing. You don’t want to know what works in your n-tier application. You want to know what doesn’t work. As that funny-looking yellow guy on The Simpsons would say, “D’oh!” And Homer ought to know, he’s a nuclear engineer. (He kinda looks like my brother-in-law Fred, only better looking.)<br /><br />I know that this blinding insight may come as a surprise. But it’s not your fault. Nobody talks about dysfunctional testing. Googling for dysfunctional testing brought up 11 results. Eleven! By contrast, Googling the phrase functional testing led to 253,000 results. That’s just a crime.<br /><br />It’s clear that everyone has their priorities wrong.<br /><br />What do I mean by dysfunctional testing? Finding out where the code breaks. It’s just that simple. Really. Stop looking to see what works, and instead see what doesn’t work. Imagine that your million-line client/server system is 98 percent bug-free.<br /><br />When you’re doing functional testing, you’re testing 100 percent of the application. That could take hours during the nightly test run. Stupid! If you just test the two percent that doesn’t work, you’ve cut the test time down to minutes.<br /><br />The advantages of dysfunctional testing are all the more compelling when your organization gets higher in the quality scale. Say you’re working you’re way up the Capability Maturity Model ladder, stuck between rungs 2 and 3, and your million lines of code is 99.8 percent functional. Imagine the bottom-line benefits of testing only the 0.2 percent of the code that’s dysfunctional—that’s only 2,000 lines of code.<br /><br />How hard can it be to test 2,000 lines of code, remediate the dysfunctions, and then refactor like mad to improve the runtime performance? Not hard at all. You’ll be at Six Sigma in no time, guaranteed. Take that, W. Edwards Deming!<br /><br />Before you nominate me for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, let’s talk about how to actually achieve dysfunctional testing within your enterprise test/QA organizations. Believe it or not, it’s not as simple as you might think.<br /><br />A key component of dysfunctional testing is something that I call “root cause analysis” — that’s a term that I’ve just made up. What you need to do is find the root cause of your software defects. In most cases, it’s easy to determine the cause: bugs. Yes, that’s it. Sometimes it might be a design flaw, but I’d put serious money on it being bugs.<br /><br />There are different ways you can get rid of bugs. One way is to use a debugger. “<span style="font-style: italic;">Yes, I just got de bugger</span>,” is something that I say a lot, ha ha! (You’ve got to have a good sense of humor if you’re working on cleaning up 2,000 lines of code before your afternoon jog.) Another way is to do a code walk through. But that can take a long time, and if you’re not good at dysfunctional testing, you might look at the wrong 2,000 lines.<br /><br />That’s definitely not recommended by the <a href="http://www.fitness.gov/">President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports</a>. A better approach is to employ a number of techniques, such as overload testing — that is, you whack the code so hard that it shatters. Forensic analysis will show you where it broke.<br /><br />(Don’t confuse overload testing with namby-pamby load testing, where you gradually increase the transaction load on an application server while monitoring its performance on a curve. Like, who has time for that?)<br /><br />Another approach is to adopt seVere Programming, my agile methodology that applies the dysfunctional testing metaphor at the daily work level. In VP, developers work in teams of three: one writes the code, one tries to breaks the code, and the third programmer smacks the first programmer with a ruler whenever a defect is found. It’s foolproof! (If the first developer runs away, this is called the Scram methodology.)<br /><br />In conclusion: Functional testing is stupid. Dysfunctional testing is smart.<br /><br />The Nobel Foundation knows where to find me.I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-29765269069648825402005-04-01T13:02:00.000-08:002007-03-15T17:58:28.572-07:00SCO Slaps Itself With Lawsuit<span style="font-weight: bold;">NEW BUSINESS MODEL SHOULD RESULT IN GAINS, LOSSES, CONFUSION</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April 1, 2005 – The SCO Group is preparing to reverse its flagging fortunes by launching a Unix infringement lawsuit against itself, according to documents obtained by this reporter.</span><br /><br />Today’s SCO Group consists of the original Caldera Group, the Unix assets purchased from Novell, and the SCO name bought from The Santa Cruz Operation. Prior to launching its lawsuits against the Linux community in 2003 — hitting companies such as AutoZone, DaimlerChrysler and IBM — Caldera was a major supporter of Linux. Indeed, in 2002 it formed a consortium with Conectiva, SuSE and TurboLinux to enhance and promote the open-source operating system.<br /><br />According to confidential documents, Caldera may have inadvertently shared intellectual property it gained after the purchase of Unix with its own open-source developers. If true, that would be a violation of its own Unix license, and as such, would expose the company to legal charges and potentially huge damages.<br /><br />“It’s possible,” pondered Ficus McMushroom, senior legal analyst with Guernsey, Jersey, Sark & Alderney. “If SCO’s Unix staff exchanged any information with their Linux staff, whether sitting at a conference table, on an internal bulletin board, or even while swilling beers at a bar, Unix license and intellectual property violations may have occurred.”<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">HAND OVER THE STICKYS</span><br /><br />Is there a smoking gun? It’s impossible to know until the lawsuit strikes, but according to the secret report, the company is prepared to subpoena extensive documents, including e-mails, voice memos and rainbow-colored Super Sticky Post-It Notes written by SCO honcho Darl McBride.<br /><br />“We’re clearly on unsteady legal ground,” observed McMushroom. “If the charges are true, the damages might run into the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.” Collecting those fees would significantly boost SCO’s revenue for 2005, the analyst noted, and could lead to a rise in stock price or dividend payments, as well as yet another round of restated financials.<br /><br />The revenue from the suit would be offset by legal fees, and may be potentially covered by SCO’s liability insurance, McMushroom believes. Any additional costs would most likely be treated as an extraordinary charge against earnings.<br /><br />But in any case, he expects SCO to come out ahead.<br /><br />But will the suit see the courtroom? “Frankly, I don’t think so,” said McMushroom. “I expect SCO to settle before depositions are taken. But on the other hand, if they go through with the suit, they may set a legal precedent for the Unix lawsuits.”<br /><br />SCO would not return calls about the rumored lawsuit.I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-4296406707374167222005-04-01T10:40:00.000-08:002007-03-15T17:58:58.904-07:00Eclipse Gains Local, Interstellar Support<span style="font-weight: bold;">April 1, 2005 – The Eclipse Foundation today has announced 14 new strategic members, encompassing leading IT vendors, major technology consumers and at least one alien race.</span><br /><br />Many of the new members will be extending existing Eclipse projects. For example, the Sesame Workshop will lead development of a new cookie-handling format for the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project.<br /><br />“Frankly, we like working with BIRT,” smiled Ernie, the affable spokesperson for the Sesame Workshop, “because it reminds us of our friend Bert. Bert likes cookies.”<br /><br />“This open-source project is sponsored by the letters A and F, and the number 5,” added Ernie.<br /><br />Getting involved in the Eclipse Foundation’s infrastructure challenges are Plumbers and Steamfitters Local No. 43 and Sheet Metal Workers Local No. 16. “It takes a lot of plumbing and ducting to make enterprise computing work,” said shop steward Fergus McEwan, who will represent the unions on the foundation’s board of directors.<br /><br />McEwan indicated that the two locals will host membership rallies for Eclipse developers.<br /><br />“It’s time to bring the power of collective bargaining into the open-source community,” he explained, “to improve wages, working conditions and job security.”<br /><br />One new member fits into its own category: Strategic Warrior. According to Commander Klotha, the Klingon Imperial Navy has pledged to preserve the honor of all Eclipse developers, committers and consumers, while also donating battle-tested source code to support two new projects.<br /><br />The Eclipse Test and Performance Tools for Deployment of Disruptor Based Techniques in Combat, or ETaPTfDoDBTiC, will be used to create open-source frameworks for programming and tuning real-time system controls for high-intensity phased photonic beam emission systems. Meanwhile, the new pIqaD project will seek to port the Eclipse IDE’s user interface to become compatible with the Klingonaase script and triangular display devices used on distant Qo’noS.<br /><br />The Imperial fleet also will propose a Stellar Modeling Framework project to be added to the Eclipse Modeling Framework and newly formed Graphical Editing Framework. The SMF would be incubated within the Eclipse Technology Project, and would have many applications in sixth-dimensional cartography, tachyon flux computation, warp-speed navigation and Organian peace treaty negotiations, said the commander.<br /><br />“You have good software tools on this planet,” praised Klotha. “<span style="font-style: italic;">Kai</span> Eclipse! <span style="font-style: italic;">Qapla’</span>!”I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-8500709412640432202004-04-01T14:05:00.000-08:002007-03-15T15:23:01.973-07:00Luxury Life-Cycle Management<span style="font-weight: bold;">April 1, 2004 — It’s been four years since the bursting of the tech bubble, and software development managers are fast approaching the time when many of our most prized developer tools will need upgrades or replacements. I speak, of course, of luxury goods, many of which were last purchased in 1998 or 1999 using vested stock options. </span><br /><br />Clearly, our industry faces challenges in addressing consumer-product life-cycle issues, given the fact that bonuses have been slashed, current options are under water, and a daily regimen of 93-octane 24-valve engines has been replaced by the South Beach Diet.<br /><br />In other words, go-go consumerism is dead, and carb-counting is the new business reality. Thus, we must carefully ponder our luxury-goods budgets with an eye toward receiving maximum value and the greatest return on investment.<br /><br />Take transportation. Many of us are stuck driving vehicles that exceed 50,000 miles. To<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span>continue showing up at the office in, for example, a 1997 Land Rover Discovery or 2000 Porsche Boxster would tell top management that we’ve fallen off the CIO fast track.<br /><br />So, what to buy? With an eye toward maximizing date-acquisition potential and perceived value, consider the new Mazda RX8. With a starting MSRP of US$25,180 to $26,680, you can easily afford the payments (be sure to hide the coupons), while talking up the history of the Mazda RX series and the benefits of its unique 1.3-liter rotary engine technology, which generates 238 horsepower and 159 ft.-lbs. of torque. On second thought, don’t talk about the torque on that car.<br /><br />In the compact sport-utility department, the BMW X3 is a fine upstart, with an MSRP of only $30,300 to $36,300. While the fit-and-finish on those vehicles isn’t up to BMW’s usual standards, the impressive nameplate will inspire confidence in your superiors and envy in your minions.<br /><br />Alas, we can’t turn back the clock. If only the economy and NASDAQ stock index were performing at early-2000 levels, those of us who prefer to ride in true comfort would enjoy the new 225-inch Maybach Type 57 (MSRP: $305,500), or even the 242-inch Maybach Type 62 (MSRP: $357,000).<br /><br />Who wouldn’t love that 550-horsepower V-12 with 663 ft.-lbs. of torque? But instead, we must fall back to, say, the equally new Jaguar XJR, which at $59,830 to $75,330 is a veritable steal. Tip: Be sure to opt for the 390- horsepower 4.2-liter V-8, which offers a reasonable 399 ft.-lbs.of torque.<br /><br />Now that we’ve straightened out your ride, let’s address a more timely matter — the timepiece. The dressy Movado Classic Museum that you’ve been proud of is, to be blunt, passé.<br /><br />So is the Rolex Oyster Perpetual; maybe it’s not your father’s Oldsmobile, but it’s your father’s watch. More powerful brands, which demonstrate our modern consumer savvy, include Tag Heuer’s Kirium series and Breitling’s Crosswind or B-1 Professional.<br /><br />If that still exceeds your options level, you can achieve great looks at minimal expense with Skagen. The downside is titanium is becoming tired, and you do find Skagen advertised in airline magazines. Still, tough times call for desperate measures, and you have my sympathies. (At least it’s better than Timex, or — shudder — Swatch.)<br /><br />Jewelry is always an important style issue and remains vital, even during an economic recovery. Did you know that U.S. diamond jewelry sales in the fourth quarter of 2003 jumped by nearly 10 percent, to reach $9.27 billion? Much of this increase was due to sales of higher-ticket items. That’s right — larger rocks, better metals and more elaborate settings for both male and female software development managers. Don’t be afraid to demonstrate your financial prowess through the proper accoutrements. Hint: Go for the platinum setting, which can lead to many interesting conversations about the use of that precious metal as a catalyst for many important industrial chemical processes.<br /><br />Shoes are also important fashion accessories, and while they may not make the man or woman, they certainly help us give the impressions we want.<br /><br />Bear in mind the impact of outsourcing and offshoring on the ranks of middle- and upper-level software development and IT management. If someone’s job is going to get whacked, you don’t want it to be yours. No matter your budget, make sure that your foot apparel demonstrates appeal, and properly shows that you’re too successful and experienced to lay off.<br /><br />Ladies, consider Robert Cavalli, Jimmy Choo or, if money is tight, Finn Comfort. Gentlemen, look at Bruno Magli or Mezlan. After all, if the shoe fits... buy it!I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-47700240528971754712001-04-01T15:13:00.000-07:002007-03-15T15:14:13.807-07:00IETF, W3C Embrace XXXML<span style="font-weight: bold;">STANDARDS BODIES EXCITED ABOUT B-TO-A SCHEMA</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April 1, 2001 — In a move that surprised no one, the Internet Engineering Task Force and World Wide Web Consortium working groups have thrown their weight behind XXXML, the business-to-adult XML metadata schema recently proposed by the adult entertainment industry.</span><br /><br />“We’re delighted,” chirped Buffy DeJour, senior spokesmodel for the XXXML Alliance, a nonprofit trade association based in Las Vegas. “Many of the IETF and W3C committee members privately indicated their enthusiastic support for our position during one-on-one meetings. In fact, several of the voting members asked for additional private consultation, and we tried hard to accommodate their every need.”<br /><br />DeJour described XXXML (pronounced Triple-X ML) as the ultimate schema for describing the products and services required for robust B-to-A commerce. “Sizes, colors, preferences—they’re all part of the specification,” she said. “We made sure to document every model, so that there could be no confusion. In many cases, we even provided pictures or home movies.”<br /><br />According to DeJour, the adult entertainment industry is at the leading edge of electronic commerce. “Look at what’s driven new technologies, like the VCR and the Web: adult products! That’s where the revenues are, the demand is, the profits are. That’s what consumers need and what the industry demands. And although we simply could have released XXXML as a specification from our alliance, we’d much prefer to go the standards route. That’s healthier, and more pleasurable, for all involved.”I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-21025706506948687552001-04-01T09:22:00.000-07:002007-03-15T14:51:37.069-07:00New Language Targets Sub-Average Programmers<span style="font-weight: bold;">MICROSOFT C-- OFFERS BASIC OBJECTS, KINDERGARTEN-LEVEL SYNTAX</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April 1, 2001 — Trying to bridge the gap between its Visual Basic for Applications and C# programming languages, Microsoft Corp. today unveiled the latest member of its Visual Studio.NET family: C--, a C-like language written for sub par corporate developers.</span><br /><br />“During the past three or four years, many businesses have been forced to hire second-rate programmers,” said Jasper “mad cow” Holstein, Microsoft’s junior product manager for C-- (pronounced C minus minus). “We’ve known for a long time that those sub-par developers can’t hack real object-oriented programming languages like C++. We tried creating an easier language for them to use, C#, which is just like Java only better. But frankly, a lot of those old COBOL and RPG programmers just don’t get it. Thus, Visual C--.”<br /><br />Unveiled by Microsoft chief software architect Bill Gates during February’s magnitude 6.8 earthquake in Seattle, C-- is poised to rock the world for millions of inept programmers across the globe, said Holstein. “Ask yourself these simple questions: Can you use a mouse? Can you connect lines to circles? Can you find the semicolon on your keyboard? If you answered yes to at least two of these, then you can program in C--. Not very well, but if you were any good, you’d be using C#. Right?”<br /><br />According to technical documentation provided on Microsoft’s Web site, C-- offers developmentally challenged programmers several benefits over C# or Visual Basic: simplicity, in that the only punctuation mark used is the semicolon and the IDE accepts only upper-case letters; fiscally responsible object orientation without an inheritance tax; type safety, in that the integrated development environment includes a spell checker; scalability, in that programmers can run their software on either notebook or desktop PCs; and version control, because C-- programs run only on the latest version of Windows.<br /><br />“The goal is to balance productivity and simplicity,” said Holstein. “Since corporations realize that their bottom-tier coders aren’t very productive anyway, C-- will help them do simple things. In our benchmarks, trained C-- programmers can create a ‘Hello, World’ program with only 150 lines of code, and can have it running in less than an hour. Those same programmers took nearly three days to perform that same task using C#, and most never got the C++ version of ‘Hello, World’ working even after a couple of weeks.”<br /><br />Microsoft will be releasing the beta of Visual C--.NET on April 1, according to Holstein. Sun Microsystems Inc. chairman Scott McNealy, after watching the C-- introduction on CNN, hinted that his company had also been developing a watered-down programming language, code-named “AuLait,” and that it and the J2WE (Java 2 Weak Edition) should be ready for public consumption by this year’s JavaOne conference.I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8665978789539652811.post-50608550184054188472000-04-01T13:58:00.000-08:002007-03-15T14:50:13.768-07:00Xenix Returns!<span style="font-weight: bold;">MICROSOFT EMBRACES, EXTENDS OPEN-SOURCE MOVEMENT</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April 1, 2000 — </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">In a dramatic change in direction, industry giant Microsoft Corp. today has publicly pledged to embrace the open-source software movement. Unveiling the company’s new Linux initiatives, president Steve Ballmer decreed, “The days of proprietary solutions are over.”</span><br /><br />Sharing a stage with GNU Project founder Richard Stallman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ballmer announced that the company will be releasing its Windows 2000 operating system as open source, subject to the GNU Public License. “We made this decision last summer,” said a company spokesman.<br /><br />Under the terms of the new Windows license, software discs for Windows 2000 Professional and Server will be available for US$35 for executable code only, and $70 for a two-disc set containing source code. Following usual open-source community practice, support will not be included in the package. Customers wishing support can subscribe to a support contract.<br /><br />Ballmer also demonstrated the company’s forthcoming Microsoft Office 2000 and Visual Studio 7 for Linux. “Many of our developers are Linux enthusiasts,” he disclosed.<br /><br />“They’ve been running Linux on their development stations for two years. Not only is Windows 2000 itself written in Visual J++,” he said, “but we’ve also created native Linux versions of Office and Visual Studio for in-house-use,” said Ballmer, adding, “Now’s the time to release those products into the mainstream.”<br /><br />Also announced on April 1 was that the forthcoming Windows Millennium Edition (Windows ME) is actually based on the Linux kernel, with DOS, Win16 and Win32 compatibility layers and a port of the Windows Explorer user interface.<br /><br />“We’ll be releasing the Windows compatibility source code for all major Linux and Unix ports,” said Ballmer, singling out Sun’s Solaris as the next target for Microsoft’s full line of business software. “Look for our own branded version of Linux to be released next year as a separate product,” he added, hinting, “Now’s the time to bring back the Xenix brand,” referring to Microsoft’s version of Unix, available in the late 1980s.I.B. Phoolenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732902776016731105noreply@blogger.com0