The shift to remote working happened at such a massive scale and in such a short time that collaboration tools have been dubbed the “new work nucleus.” 

The business technology review site TrustRadius wrote that it saw a 400% increase in traffic to the collaboration software category from the beginning of the pandemic to now. Also, last month’s collaboration traffic was four times as much as traffic from exactly a year ago, correlating directly to buyer intent.  

Meanwhile, research firm IDC found that a whopping 96% of North American businesses will be spending more and investing more on team collaboration solutions into 2021. 

Major software companies are seeing tremendous opportunities in expanding into the collaboration tool space. 

In early December, Salesforce issued a bid for $27.7 billion to acquire Slack, which if it comes to fruition, would make it the second-largest software deal in history. 

“Being able to kind of federate out the work of best tooling and having that all integrated I think that’s a brilliant strategy by Salesforce and also really empowering the remote workers too, because just between the nature of the cloud and everything that they’re doing with enabling people to work from anywhere access, and then combining that with Slack,” said Dave Messinger, the CTO and vice president of product at Topcoder. 

The collaboration market is mature and cloud office suites have gained widespread adoption as primary tools for organizations for file sharing and work collaboration. There is currently a lack of differentiation among the core features that these platforms offer, forcing vendors to look towards specialization, according to Gartner in its Market Guide for Content Collaboration Tools released in May 2020. 

Aspects of collaboration in these platforms — such as file sharing, device synchronization and the provisioning of collaborative workspaces — have been fleshed out by collaboration platforms. 

Within various industries, the most sought-after collaboration feature was video conferencing with 65% of companies adding it to accommodate changing work requirements during COVID 19, according to Avaya in its “Work from Anywhere” study released in October 2020. Avaya is a business collaboration and communication solutions provider. 

This was backed up by TrustRadius, which showed that the most searched comparison between collaboration vendors was Microsoft Teams and Zoom for their video conferencing capabilities, and by a giant margin.

Integrations the biggest topic
But aside from features such as video conferencing and chat, collaboration platforms also offer project and task management, workflow automation, abilities to track location and changes to a file, and much more. Tool providers are primarily looking to pull these functionalities together with integrations. 

Integrations have become especially important as organizations are using many different collaboration tools within their organizations for different tasks.

For cloud-based productivity, teams rely mostly on G Suite and Office 365. Then, they implement video conferencing tools such as Zoom or WebEx and workflow automation tools such as Jira and ServiceNow. 

“Jira is also a popular tool for developers these days. I’d say there’s a 50/50 split between issue management on Jira vs GitHub among the wider developer community. Most developers prefer GitHub because it’s friendlier, but probably too slow for project management, so as companies grow they are switching to Jira,” Aaron Haynes, the CEO of Loganix, wrote in an email. Loganix offers link building services for SMBs and SEO agencies.

Finally, organizations are using instant messaging tools such as Slack and Teams as primary forms of contact. And there are usually many more circulating at once. Now, companies are looking more at unified solutions. 

“You traditionally see organizations using many tools — typically one for planning, another for creating code, another for building and deploying it, and 1-3 tools for monitoring and observability. However, what we’ve seen happening is a need for a single DevOps platform. Some enterprises have tried stitching these disparate tools together into their own “DIYOps” platform, but this undifferentiated work distracts their teams from the business goals and their customers. Thus, teams and DevOps tools companies alike are moving towards a single DevOps platform,” Brendan O’Leary, a senior developer evangelist at DevOps solution provider GitLab, wrote in an email.

The different types of tooling are implemented because there are primarily three layers to collaboration. The first is a communications layer and the second is essentially a content layer, where organizations can do their file sharing. And the third layer is that productivity layer. That’s the integrations of the IP stack and this varies by department, according to Wayne Kurtzman, a research director of Social and Collaboration at IDC. 

“This change really puts the abilities of developers who know what these tools really can do into a new level. We’re going to see additional integrations and this is where collaborative apps get their superpowers,” Kurtzman said. “Once you add workflow, the core IP stack, and the MarTech stack and integrate them, they develop new metrics that are just starting to be recognized and the developers pretty much understand this. So 2021 is going to rock for developers.”

Providing workspaces
With integrations, collaboration tool providers are now focusing on providing the right team workspaces. 

“An effective collaboration tool enables developers to sync up the different tooling,” Topcoder’s Messinger said. “Like right now Jira and GitLab integrate out of the box and there’s a lot of integrations you can set up. So developers are in GitLab tagging the issues they want, and that syncs to a SaaS with Jira.”

The necessity of proper integrations with collaboration tools is also driven by more complicated pipelines that have emerged at development companies due to CI/CD growth, Messinger added.

In the past, traditional pipelines went from QA to a production release. Now, the process includes much more shifting between different parts of the organization.

“We have several clients now in the enterprise space that are doing this now with much more complicated multi-step, multi environments and multi-company type development pipelines. So I think, you know, being able to find the right resource and the right talent has always been a problem for these guys from a deployment and development standpoint,” Messinger said. “So being able to integrate those collaboration tools or those pieces is just critical.

While the collaboration tools can handle some scenarios effectively they can still be difficult to use in others. 

“Tasking, status reports, and the standard software development life cycle is pretty nailed down and easy to follow. I think tools like Slack have made things easier and even now like being able to add a kind of bridge corporate Slack so we can add customers and have our Slacks talk to each other and still be compliant. Teams is doing a good job of that as well,” Messinger said. “I think probably where some of that stuff may fall down is I think it’s tough to make some of that stuff be like a system of record. So it’s almost too easy to collaborate in some cases as like, ‘Hey, did you change that requirement or that piece of information?’ And it’s like, ‘Oh, it was in a Slack conversation?’ It’s like good luck going back and finding that piece of information where it was agreed to in a Slack conversation.”  

Messinger added that he has seen a dramatic increase in interest for whiteboard-type tools. These include tools like Trello and Miro. He added that tools like Miro are doing a better job of creating that collaborative environment than before, though it’s still not the same as just being able to sit down and collaborate with everyone in one location on the whiteboard. 

Customer collaboration, features are focus
Another phenomenon that has been picking up steam regarding collaboration tooling is that tool providers are working to provide ways for their customers to suggest additional features and integrations. 

“I think one of the more interesting aspects in collaboration the last few years is how enterprises increasingly are adding both partners and even user customers to collaborate, not necessarily in the same private group, but they’re extending their collaboration network so they can get better, and more loyalty and trust is built by the companies who now are communicating and feel that they have more input,” IDC’s Kurtzman said. 

One such place for collaboration between consumers is Microsoft Teams’s Uservoice site, where people can suggest changes and people can vote on those changes.

“Microsoft is actually implementing those changes,” said Mark Rackley, a partner and chief strategy officer at PAIT Group, a Microsoft technology consultancy. “So if there’s something you don’t like about Teams today, there’s a good chance that it’s going to change in two, three, or six months so just keep an eye on all the changes.” 

Vendors are also working on producing customized views and reports and developing AI, advanced analytics, virtual assistants and machine learning within their platforms. 

“People are in there doing conversations every day so why not do conversations with a bot to do other tasks within their organization whether that’s general help questions, or things like filling out simple forms for vacation requests and things like that to start other workflows,” Rackley said. 

IDC’s Kurtzman agreed that interest in machine learning and AI in collaboration tools has seen great interest as a way to free up developers’ time. “We’re also seeing an increase in people learning basic coding skills to take the next step. At the same time, we’re seeing enterprises look to no-code where possible, but still there’s complexity, higher value complexities that developers will need to fulfill,” Kurtzman said. 

A large determining factor as to what tools a company chooses is how easy it is to set up and for teams to start using it. This became especially important as many organizations were forced to shift from their physical workspaces to the digital realm in a matter of days. This forced newcomers on the bandwagon quickly, and also those organizations that already had pockets of collaboration tools had to assess how they would move their work entirely online. 

“One of the most important things that happened to collaboration applications in 2020 is that the adoption, not the revenue, but the adoption of collaboration applications jumped by a five-year span in a period of only six months between January through June 2020,” said Kurtzman. 

PAIT Group’s Rackley said the pandemic has quickly pushed implementation of collaboration tools up on organizations’ priority lists.

“It’s interesting because a lot of time was spent before saying let’s spend a lot of time planning, but now it’s just like let’s forget planning and we need Teams now. We’ll worry about the planning and the cleaning up after the fact,” Rackley said. 

What do you want to do?
The difficulty of adopting these tools largely depends on what kind of functionalities companies expect to use. File sharing and chatting and calls are pretty straightforward, but when users want to start customizing and integrating into other things, while it still might be pretty simple,  people might need someone to show them first so that they can do it, Rackley explained. 

Topcoder’s Messinger added that while collaboration tooling might not be as easy as a one-click deploy to get it done, it can usually be measured in weeks or less. The more important factor in the way tooling is adopted in an enterprise largely depends on the collaboration culture surrounding it. 

“The tooling may not be as out-of-the box as being able to do a one-click deploy to get the tooling done, but it’s also not like a three-month drive. If you think of some of the tooling, it’s probably maybe measured in a week or less to set up, but the acceptance, the openness is really a cultural shift. I actually think that’s been a forcing factor from COVID that people have really moved the culture that way,” Messinger said. “If companies had already done their homework and were following a DevOps culture, then it’s tremendously easier to add collaboration, add remote workers, work at home, and use alternative staffing models.”

Many web and mobile applications have already been working in this sort of DevOps manner over the last 10 years or so and the difficulty in creating a collaborative environment might come down to the large packaged applications.

“This is where managers have to become facilitators and it changes the way they manage. And that’s one of the big challenges for them is they have to create online exactly what they would if they were to create a community in real life, they need to have a safe place where people are willing to share their best ideas, where they feel safe,” IDC’s Kurtzman said. “It really comes down to the culture and the willingness to employ the creativity in your workforce and your management team.” 

More developers are turning to open source to collaborate
Before the pandemic, developers were collaborating on open-source projects in GitHub from all places in the world, but this phenomenon has seen a massive boost during the pandemic. 

The GitHub State of the Octoverse 2020 report found that developers are sharing and reviewing code faster compared to last year. In May, over 40% more repositories were created compared to last year, and since then, roughly 25% more open-source repositories have been created compared to the same time period last year. 

GitHub measured the level of collaboration on its platform based on the speed of pull requests. Early in the year, the time to merge pull requests took a few hours longer compared to last year. In March, time to merge began to be faster, ranging from 45 minutes to almost seven and a half hours faster in comparison to last year, according to GitHub. 

Across all GitHub repositories, newcomers pushed code and created repositories much more than veterans, while also interacting a bit more than veterans with creating and commenting on issues and creating pull requests. 

Earlier this year to further collaboration on the platform, GitHub announced Discussions, in which teams can post updates and or have a conversation that spans projects or repositories in a forum. 

“This provides an opportunity for us to think about different ways for people to engage with open-source communities. Participating in and watching Discussions can be a good way for newcomers to learn community norms and patterns in a safe way that doesn’t overwhelm maintainers,” GitHub wrote in the Octoverse report. “These patterns have applications in enterprise settings too.”

The post WFH reveals an ‘I’ in team appeared first on SD Times.

The new release adds updates to the performance and memory pages, and a completely new network page.

“One major benefit of choosing Flutter is that selecting a distribution model is something we can do after we’ve written the code, rather than the first decision we have to make,” the Flutter team wrote in a blog post.

AWS Porting Assistant for .NET
AWS announced the Porting Assistant for .NET, a new tool that helps customers analyze and port their .NET Framework applications to .NET Core running on Linux.

The offering is able to assess both the application source code and the full tree of public API and BuGet package dependencies to identify those that are incompatible with .NET Core. 

Developers will need to install the .NET Core 3.1 SDK and create a credential profile, which is  used to collect compatibility information on the public APIs and packages. 

Additional details on how to get started with the new tool are available here.

Apache Samza 1.5 released
The new release brings Samza Container Placements API, which gives users the ability to move or restart one or more containers, and Job Runner will now submit Samza job to Yarn RM without executing any user code.

Samza provides leading support for large-scale stateful stream processin

This release contains backward incompatible changes regarding samza job submission.

Additional details are available here.

Enhanced Smart Home Analytics
Google announced that it’s releasing enhanced analytics and logging for Smart Home Actions, which enables users to more quickly identify and respond to errors or quality issues that may rise. 

These metrics help you quantify the health and usage of your Action, and gain insight into how users engage with your Action.

Users can view execution types and device traits used, the number of daily users and request counts, user query response latency, and the success rate for Smart Home engagements. 

Additional details are available here.

The post SD Times news digest: Flutter Dart DevTools, AWS Porting Assistant for .NET, and Google’s Smart Home Analytics appeared first on SD Times.

CodeArtifact can be used with popular build tools and package managers such as Maven and Gradle (for Java), npm and yarn (for Javascript), and pip and twine (for Python), with more to come, according to AWS. 

“Working with a multitude of artifact repositories can present some challenges to organizations that want to carefully control both versions of, and access to, the software dependencies of their applications,” Steve Roberts, a developer advocate at AWS, wrote in a post that contains additional details on the new release. “By using a centralized repository, it becomes easier for organizations to manage access control and version changes, and gives teams confidence that when updating package versions, the new versions have been approved for use by their IT leaders.”

Roberts explained that while larger organizations may use traditional artifact repository software to solve challenges, smaller organizations generally don’t have the resources to maintain it. 

CodeArtifact automatically scales and requires no infrastructure installation or maintenance. Since it’s a polyglot artifact repository, it can store artifact, it can store artifact packages of any supported type side-by-side in one location, according to the company.

To publish packages into their repositories, or ingest packages from external repositories, teams can use the package manager tools that their developers are used to. 

After giving the repository a name and optional description, CodeArtifact offers the option to connect the repository to several upstream repositories. When requests are made for packages not present in a repository, CodeArtifact will pull the respective packages from these upstream repositories, and cache them into the CodeArtifact repository.

AWS stated that AWS CloudFormation support for CodeArtifact is coming soon.

The post Amazon releases its own managed software artifact repository service appeared first on SD Times.

Previously, developers had to set up changes or integrations to the build process by configuring every command to run at build, downloading and validating every dependency, and writing the code to make it all work, the company explained. 

Build Plugins are designed to make developers more productive by creating a CI/CD workflow designed for frontend developers, offering plugins reviewed by the Netlify team, enabling the use of an existing plugin or bringing your own, and allowing one-click install from the Netlify UI. 

Additional details are available here.

Docker extends its collaboration with Microsoft
Docker extended its collaboration with Microsoft Azure to boost developer productivity by enabling Docker commands to run applications in Azure Container instances. 

The deeper collaboration, which also includes tighter integration with Visual Studio Code, will allow developers to quickly start new language-specific projects in Node.js, Python, .NET Core/C#,  leverage new functionality around the Compose Specification and streamline how they switch from local development to a serverless cloud container service while remaining in the Docker CLI user interface or from within VS Code, according to Docker. 

“This new seamless experience from desktop to cloud means developers can more quickly and easily collaborate and create applications to run in Azure,” said Amanda Silver, the corporate vice president of product for developer tools at Microsoft.

Additional details are available here.

Cloudtamer.io’s continuous cloud compliance
Cloudtamer.io built its platform around three pillars of cloud governance: account management of cloud accounts as well as user/group permissions and abilities inside the software and inside the cloud service providers, budget enforcement, and compliance automation. 

“Our compliance dashboard brings the most important information forward to help your security team see the current state of the environment. The dashboard is what your leaders want to see – how is my cloud doing right now,” cloudtamer.io wrote in a post.

The new continuous compliance capability is made up of three core components: the dashboard, the engine, and the API. 

Eggplant adds deep learning to its platform
The newly added intelligence platform with deep learning simplifies and accelerates test automation and provides impact analysis to detect risks. 

“With the increased reliance on digital, it has never been more critical for businesses to scale and optimize DevOps to deliver a frictionless high-quality digital experience. Eggplant’s DAI platform supports continuous intelligent automation that tests from the users’ perspective rather than just code compliance,” Eggplant wrote in a post.

Other new additions to Eggplant’s Digital Automation Intelligence platform include the Business Impact Predictor that uses analytics to drive a visualization that shows users the overlap of common application failure patterns. 

New collaboration experience for Telerik Fiddler
Fiddler announced a new Sharing feature which makes sure that Fiddler users solve together and on one workspace rather than on their individual systems. 

Users can share their sessions via email, allow users to add comments on specific sessions and add context to their analysis, and will soon allow users to create Workspaces on the cloud and work on shared instances.

Additional details are available here.

The post SD Times news digest: Netlify Build Plugins, Docker extends collaboration with Microsoft, and Eggplant deep learning capabilities appeared first on SD Times.

The company first announced plans to support more big data tools last year when it announced a preview of the IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate plugin with Apache Zeppelin notebooks integration. Since the plugin started with only Scala support, it made sense to only make it available for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate. But now that the team has added more support for a wider set of scenarios and tools, JetBrains felt it was time to extend out the capabilities and make it available to other IDEs.

“We believe the plugin will extend the capabilities of DataGrip users when it comes to working with distributed file storage systems and columnar file formats. At the same time, the users of PyCharm who use PySpark or who also work with data will benefit from having this plugin available in their IDE,” the team wrote in a post.

The current feature set includes a file browser for distributed file storage systems such as AWS S3, HDFS, and GCS, with support for other clouds such as Microsoft Azure in the works. The capability will enables users to browse folders and files, preview files, and manage files. It also includes a viewer for columnar file formats such as Parquet with support for other formats coming soon. Spark clusters get a monitoring console that allows users to browse cluster nodes, Spark jobs, their stages, and tasks. 

The current version of the plugin for PyCharm and DataGrip offers all features that are available in IntelliJ IDEA except Zeppelin notebooks, although JetBrains said it is working on adding it soon. 

Please note that the plugin is currently available for IDEs with version numbers 2020.1 or higher.

Additional documentation is available for DataGrip and PyCharm. 

The post JetBrains joins the big data space with new tools for DataGrip and PyCharm appeared first on SD Times.

“With open source code freely available to the security community, OpenDXL Ontology enables any tool to automatically gain the ability to communicate and interoperate with all other technologies using this language,” the OCA explained in a post.

RELATED CONTENT: ‘Security debt’ focus of 2019 State of Software Security report

OpenDXL Ontology is based on the Open Data Exchange Layer (OpenDXL), an open messaging framework to develop and share integrations with other tools. With the release of the language, the alliance can provide a single, common solution for notifications, information, actions and communicating with other tools. In addition, it  provides companies with a set of tooling that can be applied once and automatically reused everywhere across all product categories, while also eliminating the need to update integrations as product versions and functionalities change

“For example, if a certain tool detects a compromised device, it could automatically notify all other tools and even quarantine that device using a standard message format readable by all. While previously this was only possible with custom integrations between individual products, it will now be automatically enabled between all tools that adopt OpenDXL Ontology,” according to the alliance.

The OCA community said it is currently collaborating on GitHub and Slack to further new open-source code and use-cases for cybersecurity industry interoperability. The OCA will continue development for both STIX Shifter, an out-of-the-box search capability for security products of all types, and OpenDXL Ontology.

“The adoption of OpenDXL Ontology will help create a stronger, united front to defend and protect across all types of security tools, while reducing the burden of point integrations between individual products,” the OCA wrote. 

The alliance also announced the formation of a technical steering committee to help drive the technical direction and development of the organization. Members of the committee include leaders from AT&T, IBM Security, McAfee, Packet Clearinghouse and Tripwire.

The post Open Cybersecurity Alliance announces new language for connecting cybersecurity tools appeared first on SD Times.

But this year, VR is just another platform among the many that developers must consider when building a new application. Between mobile devices, consoles, handhelds and desktops, the marketplace is as vibrant as ever, and the blunt realities of the business have led to something of dearth of content for various VR platforms. Put succinctly: There is no killer app.

(Related: Microsoft releases Mixed Reality dev kits)

While VR is by no means an understood concept from an interface perspective, the devices have nonetheless shipped and are thus driving sales. Developers are now able to see what’s working thanks to user feedback. In fact, many of the VR developers at GDC cited application discovery as the single greatest advantage of being in the space.

Fewer competitors means that the VR games market is almost the exact opposite of the mobile market in every way. That is to say, it’s small. Fewer games, fewer buyers, fewer developers, and fewer noise to be heard over. That, however, is a recipe for small returns on big risks, something most companies wish to avoid.

Such was the case for the team behind VR Invaders, a game developed by Russian game company My.com. Instead of betting big on VR, My.com’s development team formed and built their game a year ago in an agile fashion. Now that it’s been in the market for a full year, however, they’ve updated it for free to version 2.0, which implements advice from its player base.

This is a somewhat different course for game development houses, which typically spend years working on a single project and then leave it for the next game as soon as it ships. Instead, when it comes to VR, the small size of the current hardware footprint in the marketplace seems to reward developers who release something simple and grow it through community feedback.

Elsewhere in the VR scene, the pipeline is still hampering developer progress. Ikrima Elhassan, cofounder of VR game developer Kite and Lightning, said that building 3D art for VR is a painful process that requires slow handoffs between his company’s 3D art tools, the Unreal Engine, and the physical gear used to play the game. Because the process requires pouring art into the 3D engine and then outputting a new binary just to check if it works at all, development within the VR market can be a slow process reminiscent of the days when builds took hours.

One company trying to solve this is Limitless, which offers artists and directors an in-VR animation and scene development kit. Users can position animation points, set pieces, and actions all from within the VR space they’re creating. This means that when a set piece is added to a room, the user immediately sees what it looks like in VR, rather than having to go through a build and test process.

Limitless was founded by former Pixar employee Tom Sanocki. Pixar focuses heavily on storytelling, and that’s exactly what Sanocki said he hoped to enable with Limitless. He said that his tool allowed a team to build a 10-minute interactive VR story in four months, a significantly shorter period than using traditional tools.

What works and what doesn’t
While that will definitely help developers get their experiences to market faster, it remains to be seen if that market is truly worthwhile. Sony’s Playstation VR system has been selling well, said the company, but other companies’ VR offerings aren’t flying off the shelves.

There are some clear reasons for this, however. First of all, Playstation VR simply works with a Playstation 4, and requires no extra hardware. Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive both require a fairly burly PC with modern hardware inside, raising the barrier to entry far above the US$600 to $800 price-tag for the goggles alone.

Another sticking point is that the Xbox One’s own VR offering, tied to the Oculus Rift headset, requires users to buy a brand new Xbox One console; the original cannot be used with the Oculus Rift.

Still, VR manufacturers are not deterred. Rikard Steiber, president of Viveport and senior vice president of virtual reality at HTC, believes the real path to growth involves more outreach to consumers. This is likely to involve VR arcades, he said. Such VR shops would provide users with a pay-by-the-hour VR experience, and Viveport will even offer rental options and commercial licenses for software to foster these parlors.

This is because, he said, when the public gets its hands on VR, it’s always exciting and popular. The big trick is getting people to try it out for the first time. He said that prices for headsets and equipment will certainly fall over time, but right now, the challenge is a market education problem.

For VR developers (according to Damon Hernandez, 3D web and immersive technology developer for Samsung), mobile devices and WebVR are the platforms of the future for VR developers. He cited the ease of distribution and forthcoming support by major software players as the draw to WebVR.

“If you’re a developer and you want to make money,” said Hernandez, “go for what everybody already has. The writing is on the wall: Facebook is having WebVR talks, Google is going [in] that direction, Samsung is going in that direction. The Web is the platform for content delivery. This year, is it worth it to ship a product on that? No, but it will be stable this year, and if you want to release in Q1, Q2 or Q3 of 2018, start looking at it now.”

The post VR problems now just regular problems appeared first on SD Times.

Skill Plans offer developers learning assessment tools and resources, and the new plans target Java, JavaScript, Unreal Engine, R, IoT, and Big Data engineers and developers. Each Skill Plan focus on the skills developers need to master as new tools and trends emerge, according to the company.

More information on the new Skill Plans can be found here.  

Capriza releases suite of micro apps with Jaguar  
Capriza, an enterprise mobility company, released new software called Jaguar, which includes pre-built micro apps that aim to simplify and enable core processes for Field Services and Employee Self-Service (ESS).

The new ESS micro apps offer mobile access to quickly perform tasks like requesting PTO, viewing pay stubs, and searching corporate directories. Along with Jaguar, Capriza also redesigned the WorkSimple app so users can access business applications on the go. WorkSimple comes with a newly organized homepage for business-critical metrics, letting the user become more agile with their daily tasks.

Capriza’s Jaguar release is generally available, and more information on its features can be found here.

FOSSA announces $2.2 million seed round
FOSSA wants to help developers manage their open-source initiatives better. The company announced a US$2.2 million round of funding and the beta version of its solution.

FOSSA is designed to help developers understand what’s in their open-source code, and to comply with licenses. It provides automated license compliance, dependency analysis, and report generation.

“In a world where you no longer write or own the majority of your software products, you need a way to take control and trust your code again,” said Kevin Wang, founder and CEO of FOSSA, “Today, development keeps getting faster, and you can’t afford to slow it down with expensive legal audits and months of manual review. With FOSSA, you can continuously stay compliant, letting you build software as fast as possible with a process you can trust in the background.”

Xen Project announces MirageOS 3.0
MirageOS is getting new features and support in its latest release. MirageOS is a exokernel designed to provide secure network apps across cloud computing, embedded and mobile platforms.

Version 3.0 allows the OS unikernels to target additional hypervisors, and it provides building blocks for adding advanced features and capabilities into traditional applications.

The post Mapt’s six new Skill Plans for developers, Capriza launches suite of micro apps, and FOSSA raises funds for open-source initiatives—SD Times news digest: Feb. 24, 2017 appeared first on SD Times.

CSAIL researchers have developed a deep learning algorithm that can create a brief video that simulates the future of that scene. It is able to do this by taking a still image from a scene, according to a blog post written by MIT communications and media relations officer Adam Conner-Simons.

The algorithm is trained on 2 million unlabeled videos that include a year’s worth of footage, and the algorithm can generate videos that humans deemed to be realistic 20% more often than a baseline model, wrote Conner-Simons.

Future versions, according to the research team, could be used to improve security tactics and safer self-driving cars. And according to CSAIL Ph.D. student Carl Vondrick, “The algorithm can also help machines recognize people’s activities without expensive human annotations,” wrote Conner-Simons.

New design mode for Firefox developer tools
Firefox Developer Tools received a completely redesigned Responsive Design Mode (RDM) that makes it easier for developers to build web experiences that load and respond on screens of all sizes, browsers and platforms.

RDM is an upgrade for Firefox tools, and it aims to help developers looking to deliver experiences for web apps that work across a range of devices. To access the RDM tool, developers need to run an up-to-date version of the Developer Edition.

Some of the new features include popular device emulation, network throttling, touch-event emulation, and the ability to set device pixel ratios. Firefox Developer Tools has a series of improvements already planned for the next release of RDM.

Technavio finds global VRD market will grow
According to a report by Technavio, the global vertical retinal display (VRD) market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of of 3.51% through 2020.

To calculate market size, the report considered revenue generated from the shipment of VRD devices for virtual reality and augmented reality applications. The report found that the Americas accounted for almost 92% of the global VRD market in 2016, followed by Europe, the Middle East and Africa with 5.2%. The U.S. is the leading country in the region, followed by Canada, but the U.S. is expected to remain a leader because of companies like Magic Leap and MicroVision, as well as Avegant.

“The Americas is also one of the earliest adopters of AR, and there are a number of apps being developed for iOS and Android,” said Sunil Kumar Singh, a lead analyst at Technavio. “This gives good potential for VRD technology providers such as MicroVision to penetrate the Americas.”

A sample report can be requested here.

The post CSAIL creates algorithm that can make predictions in videos, RDM available for Firefox Developer Tools, and Technavio report maps out VRD market growth—SD Times news digest: Nov. 28, 2016 appeared first on SD Times.

With that in mind, I’ve developed this short step-by-step guide for others who may need to select tools in the future:

Identify key technical capabilities: I recently read “The Hard Thing About Hard Things,” by Ben Horowitz. In talking about hiring executives he makes two points that also apply to selecting tools. He noted, “If you’ve never done the job, how do you hire somebody good (for that job)?” When applied to selecting tools, this might translate to: “If you’ve never done the job, how do you select the best tool for the people doing that job?”

(Related: Automation is the key to software testing)

And the next one: “Write down the strengths you want and the weaknesses you are willing to tolerate.” This concept is important, because no single tool will be everything to everyone. It’s easy to fall into a trap of selecting a “just ok” tool because you are focused too much on choosing one that doesn’t have visible weaknesses. Don’t undervalue the strengths you are looking for.

To begin, identify the key technical capabilities that provide value to the end users, administrators and management. An abbreviated list of such capabilities might include the following: platform compatibility, third-party software compatibility, turn-key capabilities, configurability (point and click), customizability (coding), flexibility to conform to a variety of processes, ease of use, strength/size of user community, etc. Your organization will have additional capabilities.

Next you need to weight the technical capabilities. When creating this scale, place higher weights on those capabilities you deem most important. In some cases, we put up to 50% of the decision on a single capability, with some other extraneous ones at only five%. This helps you evaluate for strength rather than lack of weakness, as described above.

The graphic below shows an example of capabilities and their weight, for a total of 100%.

Remember that it’s in your best interest to be thorough as you weight these capabilities, so don’t skimp on time or process. I participated in a few reviews in which a cursory process resulted in badly weighted capabilities, which in turn led to the wrong tool being selected. We’ve all heard the old “garbage in equals garbage out” saying. It’s true here as well.

Identify and evaluate the tools: Employ a variety of sources such as industry events, publications, user communities and industry peers to investigate and select qualified candidates. In your effort to identify candidates don’t forget to look inside your company. What tools are you already using? You might have several candidates already in-house. You might find that this exercise grows beyond tool selection and gets in to tool consolidation if you currently own tools that need retired. If you end up with multiple tools you might need to provide guidance internally on which tool to use and why. But we can discuss those in future articles.

Consistency is critical to any tool evaluation. Do not evaluate one tool by reading the vendor’s website and a couple datasheets, then evaluate another tool by bringing it in-house for a multi-week evaluation. Figure out how you want to score each capability and evaluate each tool consistently. Some capabilities can be evaluated by reading datasheets. Others can be evaluated with a live demo and Q&A. Some capabilities you must see for yourself in your own environment.

Using a basic scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best, fill in a matrix (see below) to score each capability for each tool. You can even break out a capability in to several attributes. Below I’ve averaged the three attributes of capability 6 for a single score.

Score the tools and make a short list of tools with those capabilities: Now it’s time for some math. The weighted score is calculated using the following formula and values from Step 1 and 2:

Weight / 5 * Score = Weighted Score

For example, Tool A Capability 1:

25 / 5 * 2 = 10

Next identify the “keepers.” In this case we would short list the top scoring Tool B and Tool C. Tool A is on the cusp, because while it showed strengths in some areas, it fell far short in others. This is your shortlist of tools that meet the technical requirements you’ve identified with an emphasis on the strengths you desire.

Calculate total cost of ownership (TCO), ROI and soft benefits: The “keepers” are now evaluated for non-technical aspects, like total cost of ownership and ROI. Cost was intentionally ignored until this point. The “keepers” were evaluated and selected purely on technical capability without the bias of cost.

Price certainly is a factor in most organizations, so consider all factors that go into the total cost of owning each tool. This goes beyond the obvious upfront licensing costs. It can be tempting to consider Open Source tools “free” due to the lack of licensing costs but Open Source can be extremely expensive when factoring in all costs. Non-licensing costs can be maintenance and support renewal, the time and costs associated with training users and admins, how many admins are necessary to deploy, maintain and upgrade the tool, the skill set required for tool admins and developers, and the fully loaded cost of those people. In addition, investigate any additional hardware costs required.

Many benefits are obvious and relatively straightforward to measure. But be sure to include anticipated time savings because of the elimination of manual processes.

“Soft” benefits are more difficult to measure, but are very important to consider. For example, the company will benefit from improved team engagement resulting in happier employees, better traceability resulting in better compliance to industry regulations, and improved management reporting with accurate data resulting in better decisions?

And finally, you’ll want to make a judgment on the vision and future direction of each tool vendors. Is the vendor capable of becoming a strategic partner? Do they deliver innovation at a regular cadence? Do they have the capability to continue delivering solutions several years from now?

Present options and recommendation to stakeholders: Now that you’ve applied your ranking system to each tool and better understand the total cost of ownership and value for each, present the options to management stakeholders. Initially lay out your recommendation based upon the best technical solution. This is important, since the best technical solution is likely the one that will be most beneficial for your organization. Beyond this, it will likely lead to the most satisfied developers/practitioners, perhaps even affecting your ability to retain them. And we know how hard it is to find and retain quality programmers.

If the best solution isn’t the least expensive one, be prepared to share the business risks of choosing a cheaper solution that is less technical qualified. These might include loss of productivity, data corruption, dissatisfied staff and spending money on something that may not accomplish its purpose. Avoid the churn by choosing the solution that will actually help you accomplish your goals.

If you follow these five steps, congratulations! You’re likely making a solid business choice. When you take the time to properly evaluate your options, your organization will enjoy measurable efficiency improvements and will become an attractive place for quality people to work.

The post Guest View: Five steps to evaluating and selecting software tools appeared first on SD Times.