Developers sink 'waterfall' in favor of 'sync'

SearchWebServices.com writes:

What was clear from the research is that a majority of developers are undertaking projects that use the so-called "sync-and-stabilize" approach, in which members of a development project work on modular blocks and then synchronize their code with other members on a regular basis throughout the life of the project. It also requires that they stabilize, or debug, that work on a continual basis as well.

In a study of 150 software projects conducted jointly by MIT, Harvard Business School, the University of Pittsburgh and Hewlett-Packard Co., 64% of developers worldwide said they worked on projects in modules. A majority also produced "builds" -- or individually coded components -- on a daily basis in the early or middle stages of a project. The rates were 63% in the United States, 57% in Europe and 53% in Japan. The exception was India, where only 27% of developers were in the daily-build habit.

The interesting part is the last line above. In India, many of us are still developing using Waterfall model whereas others have moved to more evolutionary models.

XML in the Real Real World

Tim Gray writes in this article on XML-Journal:

There seem to be two kinds of XML-based initiatives out there. In the first, they don't bother too much with the niceties, they just focus on getting some things put together and happening, they make up and refine the messages as they go along, and they've been in production now for six months. The second kind takes a more carefully structured approach, builds things from the schemas out, worries a lot about choreography and data modeling and semantics, and is still in the planning stage, with the revised schedule calling for deployment two quarters from now if things go well.

That's lot of dejected talk from someone who co-authored XML recommendation. Anyways, Tim points to the continuous revolution(s) taking place in the RSS world which seems to be the greatest success story of XML so far. He writes:

Meanwhile, the biggest story in the XML world is happening just off the radar of the prognosticators and executives. It's called RSS, and it's a simple format for pumping the content of dynamic information sources around. It was invented for use by the legions of webloggers, but it's mainstream now; I no longer surf to the New York Times or the BBC or MSDN, I subscribe to them, and when something changes, I get a nice little summary and decide whether I want to check it out.

RSS has never actually been blessed as a standard, and its development has been fraught with nasty personalities and politics. There are competing versions, and the next-generation version probably won't be called RSS. But it's changing the world, and it's based on XML, and it's coming from a direction that nobody's looking in. Stand by.

Google News Alerts

Google launches Google News Alerts:

Google News Alerts are sent by email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify.

Some handy uses of Google News Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story


• keeping current on a competitor or industry


• getting the latest on a celebrity or event


• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

Introducing BPEL4WS 1.0

Well, BPEL4WS was introduced last year and has already gone into version 1.1 draft release but this article on Web Services Journal provides a very good introduction of BPEL4WS and shows how it builds on the features offered by WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction.

BPEL4WS is at the top of the WS-Transaction stack and utilizes WS-Transaction to ensure reliable execution of business processes over multiple workflows, which BPEL4WS logically divides into two distinct aspects. The first is a process description language with support for performing computation, synchronous and asynchronous operation invocations, control-flow patterns, structured error handling, and saga-based long-running business transactions. The second is an infrastructure layer that builds on WSDL to capture the relationships between enterprises and processes within a Web services-based environment.

Taken together, these two aspects support the orchestration of Web services in a business process, where the infrastructure layer exposes Web services to the process layer, which then drives that Web services infrastructure as part of its workflow activities.

The ultimate goal of business process languages like BPEL4WS is to abstract underlying Web services so that the business process language effectively becomes the Web services API. While such an abstract language may not be suitable for every possible Web services-based scenario it will certainly be useful for many, and if tool support evolves it will be able to deliver on its ambition to provide a business analyst-friendly interface to choreographing enterprise systems.

Six Kinds of Jelly Beans

This article - "Six Kinds of Jelly Beans: How the Perception of Variety Influences Consumption" on Knowledge@Wharton (free registration reqd) discusses how visual perception of activity and an abundance of choices ultimately increase consumption.

The normal economic model would be that you eat when you are hungry or that you buy things that you need and that you don’t buy things that you don’t need. But we don’t think people really know how to eat today – they look for cues. And most people don’t realize that an assortment of a product encourages them to take more. We are all mindlessly making a lot of decisions.

A very interesting study.