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When it comes to Software Delivery, The E in Email Stands for Evil

Most organizations will experience failed software projects. They won’t necessarily crash and burn, but they will fail to deliver the value the customer wants. In other words, the software projects will not deliver an appropriate level of quality for the time and resources invested. The extent of failed software projects is calculated every year in...

Business DevOps is really what we want…

I remember the famous blog by Mike Gualtieri, an analyst at Forrester stating, “I don’t want DevOps, I want NoOps,” creating a passionate debate in the DevOps community about the importance and value of operations. After reading all the comments, it seemed that the solution was a sensible one: Organizations need balance – releasing software...

Agile 2013 Retrospective

… or, “work isn’t supposed to be this much fun” I’m just about recovered from our whirlwind trip to Nashville for the Agile Alliance’s conference Agile2013. There were 1700 attendees, 200 sessions, keynotes, parties, and a little controversy. On a personal note, I was gratified to see the number of women in technology there… most...

The double-sided nature of requirements

Bad requirements are often cited as the biggest reason why software projects fail. Badly understood or missed requirements drive business executives to despair. The business and development all blame each other for why things went wrong, and ultimately the end users don’t get the system they want. Over the last 20 years, the industry has...

Testing for the API Economy

Creating integrations is hard, but testing them is even harder. Every web service API has its own vocabulary, semantics, nuances, and bugs. Every release of a web service potentially involves breaking changes, syntactic and behavioral. When these web services are controlled by 3rd parties, it gets even harder. As creating integrations is our business, we...

The Case for Integration

Putting the L in ALM – Making the case for Lifecycle Integration I think everyone agrees that software delivery is not an ancillary business process but is actually a key business process, and the ability to deliver software faster, cheaper, and of a higher quality is a competitive advantage. But delivering software is difficult, and...

Incremental code coverage as a debugging tool

(See also this article’s translation to Serbo-Croatian language by Vera Djuraskovic at http://science.webhostinggeeks.com/tasktop-blog) I joined Tasktop in part because I share the goal of increasing programmer productivity, especially by filtering out unimportant information. I also liked how Tasktop is committed to being involved with and connected to the broader Eclipse community. In this spirit, I...

Eclipse Platform Improvements for Microsoft Windows

In Eclipse 3.6 we worked with the Microsoft interoperability team to bring some major improvements for Microsoft Windows users, such as Jump Lists, taskbar progress indicator and taskbar overlay text and images. As part of Tasktop’s ongoing partnership with Microsoft, we’ve been working hard to bring you two more improvements this year: Desktop Search, and...

Integration Goodies for Git, Gerrit and Mylyn

It’s always a good time when you meet people in person that you otherwise only interact with through the Eclipse.org Bugzilla. Recently, Matthias Sohn organized a week long hackathon at the SAP offices in Walldorf bringing together committers from EGit, Mylyn, Gerrit and the community. From Tasktop, Benjamin Muskalla and I joined the hackathon. We...

What the heck are logical models?

Have you ever committed to the repository and got mail afterwards “Hey, this isn’t compiling!”? Likely you committed only some of the changes you made leaving out files required for a successful build. Let’s take a look at a simple example: In this model we have a class element Some Class in my.ecore which extends...