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
Both the state of the art and the state of the practice of testing are flawed.
Theory (the state of the art) presents us with a rich set of approaches for removing errors from software, but very little advice on how to pick and choose from that set. In fact, theory often suggests eschewing much of testing, using such formal approaches as proof of correctness instead.
The objective of testing is to satisfy people. Maybe we should use the word "satisfying" instead of testing. Well-tested software that is free of major defects is more likely to satisfy customers. But the paying customers are not the only group of people we should try to satisfy. The people on our project team deserve satisfaction, too.
Today, a new debate rages: agile software development versus rigorous software development.
-- Jim Highsmith, Fellow, Cutter Business Technology Council
There is a new software methodology war currently going on between the supporters of the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and the supporters of what is being called agile development.
I was reminded of the tale of Saint George and the Dragon (see text box below) about three years ago in a conversation with the president of a Chicago-based company that seemed incapable of delivering any piece of software on time. He was looking for someone to come in and slay the dragon -- a sweep of the sword, a thrust of the spear, and the software overruns would disappear.
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