In today’s Internet, it takes specific skills to efficiently find the “Data You Want” inside of the “Data You’re Given”. I was reminded of this the other day watching a colleague struggle through data collection, clicking buttons and getting diverted by advertisements...
Why would the average engineer want to create and use a virtual machine on their laptop or workstation? After all, usually an engineer has a perfectly good machine to work with, right? That may be true. Perhaps the engineer may even have access to more than one...
I’m just going to come out and say it: I drank the Windows Phone 8 Kool-Aid. My coworkers mock me, and I accept this. But darn it, I want to believe! (and it tastes a lot better than what I was drinking before.) And it's certainly better than if I wandered over to the...
I was recently involved in a project in which the goal was to streamline and automate a manual software deployment process using Electric Cloud's product ElectricCommander. The Scope of Work was laid out, development was underway, and my coworker and I felt very...
As the push towards the cloud continues, the inertia of its popularity can leave CTOs with the impression that the world is black and white with only two options: in the cloud or not in the cloud. The nuances and diversity of solutions can therefore be lost in the...
Here's a common situation: you manage an application; you haven't gone through a release; no patches have been applied (to your knowledge); and the infrastructure guys say that they haven't touched the network in ages. But a user calls, and to your...
To succeed in any market, a company needs to innovate, pioneer and push out the borders. The recent one-year anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs reminds of one of the tech industries greatest comeback stories. Apple's key to success, other than the charisma of Jobs...
Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development methodology that uses small and frequent incremental changes to the code base, which are incorporated into a rapid build and test environment. Each change integrated into the source repository is verified by the...
Repeatability is a intuitive aspect of daily life. If you throw a ball up, it must come down. If you throw it twenty times, the same thing will happen, up and then down. When repeatability doesn't occur we get anxious. Repeatability is equally an essential quality in...
Whenever I get a chance to see any kind of motor racing I am amazed at how many displays the engineers use to watch and monitor all the data coming from the cars. Modern performance racing cars produce a lot of data about the engine, tires, fuel consumption,...
Automated development, rather than just automated builds, offers a more holistic approach to automating the development process including building, testing and deployment. It is the cornerstone of Continuous Integration (CI). CI uses a model of small incremental...
I'm a huge fan of automation, especially when it comes to installing software. With a simple one-click solution, you can setup software on a user's workstation with little or no impact on your work load. In fact, you don't even need to do the installation -- users can...
