Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

Automated unit testing is an essential engineering practice for successful agile software development. A related practice, test-driven (or test-first) development (TDD), takes the idea of unit testing further, mandating the writing of tests before production code as a way of ensuring good, testable design. While the benefits of automated testing seem clear, teams struggle with making the writing of unit tests routine and effective.

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Business Intelligence practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

Organizations are increasingly coming to recognize the contribution that an effective business analysis function can make to their operations. In a global environment that seems to be in a constant state of fast-moving change, business analysts have the potential to assess environmental issues and develop effective responses.

An old boss of mine used to say, "If you don't want your worst enemy to read it, don't write it down." I've thought of that quote often over the last week or so as the WikiLeaks fiasco has played out. A great deal of what has been leaked is venal, but not really secret.

As the New Year approaches, I thought I'd offer some predictions and recommendations on the key BI and data warehousing developments and practices organizations should focus on. In general, 2011 looks to be a great year for BI and data warehousing.

In a previous Executive Report, 1 I argued that the terms of distribution that define a product as "open source" (the freedom to access, study, enhance, and redistribute the source code) have several important implications for organizations.

Imagine, if you will, that all owners of data centers and agents representing buyers of computing cycles get together daily and buy and sell commodity computing units (we'll call them containers) in an open exchange.