deployment

Whether it is controlling interplanetary spacecraft, managing medical records, or "merely" staying in business, it seems that more of us are facing the pressure of building and managing mission-critical systems and teams. Although it's tempting to think that reliability is all that matters, we're also forced to adapt to constantly advancing technologies, shifting priorities, and relentless competitive pressures. What can we learn about agility from great inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and the pioneers at NASA who risked everything to change the world? Is it wise to embrace innovation and take risks when so much is at stake? Can you afford to be agile when failure is not an option, or can you afford not to? Jeff Norris explores key principles of agility from a fresh and entertaining perspective by drawing on inspiring stories of people who demonstrated agile work practices long before anyone had heard of a ScrumMaster.

Quality in delivered software is intangible and very different from quality in physical goods. Some external attributes of quality software-free from defects and easy to maintain-are reflections of the code's internal qualities. When classes and methods are cohesive, non-redundant, well-encapsulated, assertive, and explicitly coupled, they are less prone to mistakes and far easier to debug, test, and maintain. David Bernstein asserts that paying attention to code quality helps us focus on the key principles, patterns, and practices used by expert developers. If you don't pay attention to critical code quality attributes, iterative development practices can quickly degrade code into a maintenance nightmare. Join David and your peers to take a deep dive into the code qualities that make software more maintainable and less bug friendly.

The question of how much-or how little-design to do up-front on a project often leads to a conundrum. Too much design often results in overkill engineering that results in extra complexity and wasted effort. Too little design results in insufficient system structures that result in extra complexity and wasted effort. So, how can you determine the right balance for a given application or system? Alan Shalloway offers a proven approach to determine how much design work to do before beginning the code-build steps in a project. Alan has learned that the trick is to discover and ponder what you don’t know, how it may affect you, and then how to isolate these risks in your code in the simplest way possible.

Soon mobile devices will be able to do most everything, right? Although it's fun to talk about how much mobile devices can or will do soon, limitations and constraints remain now and will for a long time. With the lower-tier market offering scaled-down devices, even the latest generation mobile devices have hardware, network, and operating system constraints. These limitations will seriously affect the architecture, design, and testing decisions for your mobile development projects. Jacob Stevens offers a primer on the unique dynamics and constraints of these lucrative platforms. Learn about the implications of mobile platform constraints that impact development and, ultimately, your customers' experience. Discover potential failure points hidden in hardware specifications and explore the trade-offs necessary for mobile success.