Strategic advice to leverage new technologies
Technology is at the heart of nearly every enterprise, enabling new business models and strategies, and serving as the catalyst to industry convergence. Leveraging the right technology can improve business outcomes, providing intelligence and insights that help you make more informed and accurate decisions. From finding patterns in data through data science, to curating relevant insights with data analytics, to the predictive abilities and innumerable applications of AI, to solving challenging business problems with ML, NLP, and knowledge graphs, technology has brought decision-making to a more intelligent level. Keep pace with the technology trends, opportunities, applications, and real-world use cases that will move your organization closer to its transformation and business goals.
Insight
Automation is an essential component of agile development. This is especially evident where testing is concerned. At the end of each iteration, sprint, or release, our working product is expected to be of shippable quality, even in its embryonic stages. Traditional development methods push system and acceptance testing to the end of the release cycle. This back-end testing is typically manually intensive, possibly supplemented by the use of semiautomated tools.
It is not uncommon for an agile software development team to share out DBA responsibilities among developers on the team. While this is often satisfactory, situations can arise during development cycles that are best dealt with by bringing in a specialized, dedicated DBA resource.
INTRODUCTION
Traditional development of applications over databases can be a slow, ineffective, and brittle effort. Many of the problems stem from poor communication between stakeholders. However, by following agile techniques, developers can create high-quality code that they can rework in minutes to react to the evolving understanding of their stakeholders. In this article, I take this insight a step further.
Yes, it's true that the discussions we have in our industry about methods often have the quality of dueling religious fanaticisms. So let's hit this one head-on: evolution versus intelligent design.
There's an old saying: "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there." This is especially true of process-improvement initiatives. Most change initiatives start out with a clear sense of goal (better, faster cheaper) yet stumble when all the energy and effort seem to fail to produce lasting change. How does the implementation fail if the vision seems clear?
Advisor
A Peculiar Project
Nearly two-thirds of the world's Web sites run on the Apache HTTP Server. The wildly successful Apache server was not the brainchild of a big software powerhouse such as IBM, Oracle, SAP, or Microsoft. Apache came into being because a group of individuals cared deeply about developing really great technology. Apache tells the inspiring story of the HTTP Server's development on its Web Site (see www.apache.org):
