June 6th, 2013 Bill Shaw, Consultant
Dwight Eisenhower famously said that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. It’s important to have some idea beforehand how you’re going to do a thing, after all. High-level plans give us a general idea of how we will spend our precious resources. But planning, like anything else, can be taken too far.
June 5th, 2013 Dan Fowler, Solution Architect
Salesforce recently introduced their Platform Mobile Services, a set of development tools intended to accelerate the creation of mobile applications.
June 3rd, 2013 Ben Northrop, Consultant
If you’re working on a system of enterprise scale, then you’re probably “fighting the good fight” against code entropy. Tools like PMD, FindBugs, Sonar, and the like are excellent weapons in this battle. Each of these tools gives a slightly different perspective of code rot; some show instances of dormant bugs, others violations of coding best practices, or others deviations from style conventions. All that’s left is to do is just go in there and clean it up. So get to it!
Unfortunately, as we know, it’s just not that easy. Cleaning up code takes work, and every hour of cleaning up code is an hour of not adding functionality. This makes Project Managers and Business Owners squirm (justifiably!). Additionally, cleaning up code is also risky, since a line of code changed is also a line of code that could break. And this, of course, makes QA nervous.
June 2nd, 2013 Betty George, Director of Business Development
Just over a month ago, thousands of technology and business leaders gathered at Impact 2013 in Las Vegas. The industry-diverse group discussed technology trends, including mobile, social, cloud computing and big data.
May 31st, 2013 Jorge Balderas, Consultant
I will be presenting a talk on “Web Automation Testing using Selenium” at this year’s Pittsburgh TechFest. I recently had the opportunity to use Selenium at a project and I will be sharing some of my lessons learned. I will be doing a demo using Selenium IDE and Selenium WebDriver. The talk is on June 1st at 1:15pm on Room 317 at LaRoche College.
We are also proud to be a Platinum Sponsor for TechFest this year, be sure to stop by our booth!
May 31st, 2013 Chris Winters, Consultant
This Saturday (June 1) Carol Nichols and I will be talking at Pittsburgh Techfest about our experiences implementing a sharded relational database in the Ruby on Rails environment for Think Through Math.
Unlike many talks, we’ll try to steer you away from the technology we’re discussing. We’ll cover some basics of the library and how we modified it, hurdles you’ll probably have to clear when implementing, and the difficulties in diagnosing the performance problems that led to sharding in the first place.
It’s a fun talk, and I’m quite proud that I get to talk with one of our clients. It’s a great project and team, and I think everybody has learned a ton while dealing with their phenomenal growth.
See you there!
May 30th, 2013 Mitch Goldstein, Consultant
The Java Validation API contains a number of predefined annotations that can be used for most validation applications. The API allows for creation of custom validations to enable developers to create specialized implementations.
May 28th, 2013 Sanjar Giyaziddinov, Consultant
Imagine how a typical web application works: User makes a request to the server, server serves a web page, user interacts with the page, and makes another request to the server and the cycle continues. So the application requires internet connectivity to work properly. But now HTML5 gives us the ability to design web applications or certain parts of a web application in a way that it would behave properly and reliably even when the internet connection is lost. These kinds of applications are called Offline Applications.
May 21st, 2013 Martin Andrew Habich,
When last we spoke, I discussed some of the pleasant discoveries that I had in my initial pair programming outings. In this post, I’d like to share some of the pain points I experienced, my thoughts on mitigating them, and some additional thoughts on when pair programming might be more or less appropriate.
May 16th, 2013 Martin Andrew Habich,
I’ve recently just had my first experience with serious pair programming, so I thought it would be a nice opportunity to share some of my initial impressions of the practice. Overall, my takeaways were overwhelmingly positive, but those came along with some interesting perspective shifts and a few caveats.
May 12th, 2013 Rick Kotermanski, Chief Technology Officer
This year a group of 11 members of the Summa team, including consultants, sales staff and managers, traveled to Las Vegas to attend IBM Impact 2013. As always this was a great event to network with customers, IBM staff and learn about the latest IBM product features and technology trends.
May 9th, 2013 Jorge Balderas, Consultant
Just a week before IMPACT, IBM announced IBM Integration Bus V9.0. IBM Integration Bus (IIB) is Version 9.0 of IBM WebSphere Message Broker, one of IBM’s flagship integration products. IIB V9 will be released on June 14, 2013. While at IMPACT Summa learned about several new and exciting features included on this product release. We’d like to share with you some of these new features in this post.
May 8th, 2013 Jeff Stonebrook, Mobile Solution Architect
IBM unveiled Worklight V6.0, an addition to the MobileFirst family of products, last week at Impact 2013. Scheduled to be released early this summer, Worklight V6.0 will provide an advanced mobile application platform and will include a number of enhancements. Here are the top reasons why mobile enthusiasts and businesses should look forward to the release:
May 3rd, 2013 Dan Fowler, Solution Architect
The release of certain documents can be so eagerly anticipated, it’s like Christmas morning in some circles. For investors, it might be the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter by Chairman Warren Buffet. For gardeners, it’s the seed catalogs that come as a reminder that there will in fact be a Spring, despite the current realities of a cold, dark Winter. But for the Salesforce folks at Summa, it’s the Release Notes detailing the new features coming from Salesforce.com. Lucky for us, these come out three times a year!
March 24th, 2013 Jeff Zapotoczny, Consultant
In an earlier piece from this series, Jeff Howell gave a good overview of the term quality as it applies to software development. I want to drill into just one of the items he mentioned and expand on it: continuous integration (henceforth abbreviated CI to save some bytes).
If you aren’t familiar with CI, these days you can explore the concept by trying out one of many canned products that are built to do CI for your team. With some variances, they all cover the same basic ground: running software builds automatically, whether triggered by time of day or by the event of someone committing changes to source control. Automatically running tests. Running inspections of source code (static analysis). And then there are thousands of plugins to do any number of other ancillary tasks.
So how did these kinds of products come into existence, and why?
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