The month of May started with good news for the Romanian community of technology entrepreneurs: TechHub Bucharest was officially launched, the first co-working space in Romania, exclusively dedicated to them and which belongs to the international network TechHub.

Test Driven Development (TDD) is a software development technique that combines Test First Development (TFD) with refactoring. The goal of test driven development is split between multiple points of view: code specification, not validation; in other words, is a way of thinking from the requirements or designs point of view before we can write functional code (TDD is an agile requirement and an agile design technique). Another point of view is that TDD represents a programming technique of writing clean and functional code.

In “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think” authors Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier begin by presenting the situation of the year 2009, when the virus H1N1 represented a major concern for World Health Organisation and, in particular, for the American government. The rapid evolution of the epidemics created difficulties for CDC (Centre for Disease Control and Prevention), a governmental agency, as it reported the situation with a delay of 2 weeks in comparison to the reality in the field, partly because the population did not come into contact with the medical personnel after the first symptoms appeared. Real-time reporting would have allowed for a better understanding of the size of the epidemics, an optimisation of the prevention and treatment tactics, actions with the potential of saving lives in a disaster which ultimately amounted to 284,000 victims.

These days the challenge of building a successful product includes ensuring that the product uses the available hardware resources in an efficient manner. This usually means clustering for all but the most trivial problems since our datasets have outgrown our individual computers considerably. However clustering brings a set of new problems: splitting up the processing between nodes, orchestrating the process and very importantly - ensuring that we don’t lose any data / progress if a subset of nodes goes offline - a possibility which increases dramatically as we add more and more nodes to our cluster.

In the previous number we’ve discovered what the secret of Hadoop is when it needs to store hundreds of TB. Based on a simple master-slave architecture, Hadoop is a system that can very easily store and manipulate a big amount of data. Hadoop contains two types of nodes for storing data. The NameNode is the node that plays the role of master. It knows the name and locations of each file that Hadoop stores.

The story NGO CONNECT is a wonderful story that started on the night of 24 of May. 7 young entrepreneurs that didn’t know each other came from 3 different cities in Tirgu Mures. They traveled hundreds of kilometers because the idea of SW seemed like one that would bring them a nice experience. It turned out to be one of the best experiences of their lives…one never to be forgotten and one that can bring joy to them but most importantly to others.

In this article I would like to present an introduction in the Performance Testing planning, results collection and analysis based on my experience with Performance Testing. I am presenting this info taking into consideration that the reader has experience in Performance Testing I will refer to some metrics, Non-functional requirements that I have used as examples of some concepts.

The book review for this number of Today Software Magazine belongs to that kind of books category that have an immediate impact on the reader. The focus of the book is on the practical side. The theoretical concepts are gradually introduced, starting with general terms and continuing with specific concepts and best practices. The particularity of the book consists in the fact that they are integrated immediately in an application with numerous features, which is also gradually developed throughout the entire book material.

The present article presents some of the benefits of using the Agile methodology in everyday life in the IT domain. The comparison item is the methodology that was mostly used towards the beginning of the second millennium, the Waterfall methodology, in which many of us have worked and some still do.

I am writing this article, because I have seen the “bad code = lost money” equation way too many times. The article is intended for both technical and nontechnical audiences in the IT industry. I am going to give a short and to the point explanation on how writing clean code impacts positively the financial aspects of a product.