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Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs
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"We have one division that has chosen not to use our development infrastructure, which is primarily Microsoft Team Foundation-based," says Telrik's Semeniuk. "They decided to do something that better fit their culture, experience, and needs, and started off with Git. A whole different form of release management with different tools, but it fit their culture and the experience of their team members a whole lot better." The team in question might not have to choose between Microsoft's workflow and git before long, though; Microsoft recently added Git support to Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server.
Git has also been put to use to support other parts of development such as documentation. The Gitit wiki system uses Git (or another version control system) to track and preserve changes to a community-created set of documents.
It should also come as no surprise that the cloud figures into most everyone's work as a cutting-edge software development tool. But it's not just a place to host code or a site -- it's also being eyed as a testing framework. Applico, in particular, is developing a cloud-based foundation for automated testing of its apps.
"With Android especially, you have an international market with the product running on over 500 devices," Applico's Powers explains. "If you can integrate this into a system where you can simulate all these different device types, you're going to catch a lot of issues before you go to market." To that end, Applico has been looking at a few vendors to provide tools to take the company's application builds, host them in the cloud, and perform the emulation there.
This approach seems like an attempt to refute what Sebastian Holst has claimed in "The Rise of Application Analytics: A New Game Demands New Rules." There, Holst states, "You cannot simulate production," meaning "the diversity and distribution of on-premises and cloud-based services combined with the dizzying array of devices and client-runtimes makes comprehensive testing and profiling prior to production not just difficult, but impossible."
To Holst, the solution lies in application analytics: real-time harvesting of data from application behaviors as per Telerik's work. Applico's idea is to expand the way we perform and automate testing -- not to displace analytics as a test methodology, but to use the cloud as a way to reduce the burden of testing.
Two of the most widely used tools for automation, Puppet and Chef, are also being used in creative ways.
"Using Chef and cloud servers for manual testing is fantastic," says Frankel, "since those servers will only be used occasionally for a few hours. When we're done testing, we turn off the lights and avoid paying for idle capacity. It only takes a single command to re-create a new staging environment the next time we want to test." The same process is also possible with Puppet.
5. HTML5 -- a handy, albeit hyped, solution for increasing device fragmentation
Given the current focus on mobile-first development, a great deal of attention is being paid to HTML5 and what role it will
play. On the one hand, developers are quickly jumping into HTML5, because not doing so would be self-defeating. On the other hand, HTML5 is clearly no cure-all.