Architect Consultant blog

Packt Publishing reaches 1000 IT titles and celebrates with an open invitation Birmingham-based IT publisher Packt Publishing is about to publish its 1000 th title. Packt books are renowned among developers for being uniquely practical and focused.  Packt books cover highly specific tools and technologies which IT professionals might not expect to see a high quality book on. Packt would like you to join them in celebrating this milestone with a surprise gift – to get involved you just need to have already registered, or sign up for a free Packt account before 30 th Septem ber 2012. Packt published their first book in April 2004. One of the most prolific and fastest growing tech book publishers in the world, they now have books on everything from web development to web graphics, e-learning to e-commerce, IT architecture to games, and app development. Packt supports many of the Open Source projects covered by its books through a project royalty donation, which has contribut

My next project is probably a Oracle SOA Suite 11g project, so start reading the following book. A review of the book will follow ( http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-soa-suite-11g-administrators-handbook/book ) I hope to read useful information about How to set up Oracle SOA Suite projects How to unit test How to deploy to DTAP How to monitor How to error log How to govern

Business process management  (BPM)  is a  management approach  focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic  management approach  that promotes  business  effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with  technology .  Business process management  attempts to improve  processes  continuously. It could therefore be described as a “ process  optimization  process .” It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical  management   approach . Overview A  business   process  is a “series or network of value-added activities, performed by their relevant roles or collaborators, to purposefully achieve the common  business  goal.” These  processes  are critical to any organization as they generate revenue and often represent a significant proportion of costs. As a managerial

In projects i often see that there is still a lot of confusion about User Stories and planning. This article of the famous Scott Ambler describes the way you should plan and use User Stories within Agile projects. One common mistake is that a User Story is much smaller than a Use Case. Introduction   to User Stories A good way to think about a user story is that it is a reminder to have a conversation with your customer (in XP,  project stakeholders  are called customers), which is another way to say it's a reminder to do some just-in-time analysis.  In short, user stories are very slim and high-level requirements artifacts. Initial  User Stories (Informal) As you can see in  Figure 1  user stories are small, much smaller than other usage requirement artifacts such as  use cases  or  usage scenarios .  It's important to recognize that each of the statements in  Figure 1  represents a single user story.  Figure 1. Example user stories. Students can purchase monthly p

It is not enough for today’s software developers to know their programming language well. There are further skills, that more and more companies are expecting from there employees. One of the most important is  Test Driven Development  (TDD). This is not an introduction to TDD. If you want to learn it, I recommend  Uncle Bob’s  awesome  Clean Code Videos  (Episode 6 - TDD) or simply  ask Google  for it. But many developers are writing bad code and applying TDD does not make them writing good code. Instead it makes them also writing bad tests. So this is about writing better test code. Applying simple rules To understand why test code can be bad, you should understand, what it should do. It should work as the parachute, that keeps you alive, when refactoring your code. Tests may help you to be sure nothing breaks, when adding new features to your code. But tests may also work as sample code, that documents your APIs better than any other documentaion except the code itself. But