Indeed, that's what computers are for. You can enlist your own computer to automate all of your project's repetitive tasks, ranging from individual builds and running unit tests through to full product release, customer deployment, and monitoring the system.Many teams try to do these tasks by hand. That's usually a really bad idea: people just aren't as good at repetitive tasks as machines. You run the risk of doing it differently the one time it matters, on one machine but not another, or doing it just plain wrong. But the computer can do these tasks for you the same way, time after time, without bothering you. You can transform these labor-intensive, boring and potentially risky chores into automatic, background processes that just work.In this eagerly anticipated book, you'll find a variety of popular, open-source tools to help automate your project. With this book, you will learn: How to make your build processes accurate, reliable, fast, and easy. How to build complex systems at the touch of a button. How to build, test, and release software automatically, with no human intervention. Technologies and tools available for automation: which to use and when. Tricks and tips from the masters (do you know how to have your cell phone tell you that your build just failed?) You'll find easy-to-implement recipes to automate your Java project, using the same popular style as the rest of our Jolt Productivity Award-winning Starter Kit books. Armed with plenty of examples and concrete, pragmatic advice, you'll find it's easy to get started and reap the benefits of modern software development. You can begin to enjoy pragmatic, automatic, unattended software production that's reliable and accurate every time.

     The first ebook in the series, Microsoft Azure Essentials: Fundamentals of Azure, introduces developers and IT professionals to the wide range of capabilities in Azure. The authors - both Microsoft MVPs in Azure - present both conceptual and how-to content for key areas, including: Azure Websites and Azure Cloud Services Azure Virtual Machines Azure Storage Azure Virtual Networks Databases Azure Active Directory Management tools Business scenarios Watch Microsoft Press’s blog and Twitter (@MicrosoftPress) to learn about other free ebooks in the “Microsoft Azure Essentials” series.

    The authors also include examples covering a variety of different integration technologies, such as JMS, MSMQ, TIBCO ActiveEnterprise, Microsoft BizTalk, SOAP, and XSL. A case study describing a bond trading system illustrates the patterns in practice, and the book offers a look at emerging standards, as well as insights into what the future of enterprise integration might hold. This book provides a consistent vocabulary and visual notation framework to describe large-scale integration solutions across many technologies. It also explores in detail the advantages and limitations of asynchronous messaging architectures. The authors present practical advice on designing code that connects an application to a messaging system, and provide extensive information to help you determine when to send a message, how to route it to the proper destination, and how to monitor the health of a messaging system. If you want to know how to manage, monitor, and maintain a messaging system once it is in use, get this book.

    Designed for experienced developers ready to advance their status, Exam Ref focuses on the critical-thinking and decision-making acumen needed for success at the Microsoft Specialist level.Focus on the expertise measured by these objectives:Design the application architectureDesign the user experienceDevelop the user experienceTroubleshoot and debug web applicationsDesign and implement securityThis Microsoft Exam Ref:Organizes its coverage by exam objectives.Features strategic, what-if scenarios to challenge you.Includes a 15% exam discount from Microsoft. (Limited time offer)

    In this insightful book, leading advocate Jeff Gothelf teaches you valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques from the ground up—how to rapidly experiment with design ideas, validate them with real users, and continually adjust your design based on what you learn.Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX lets you focus on the actual experience being designed, rather than deliverables. This book shows you how to collaborate closely with other members of the product team, and gather feedback early and often. You’ll learn how to drive the design in short, iterative cycles to assess what works best for the business and the user. Lean UX shows you how to make this change—for the better.Frame a vision of the problem you’re solving and focus your team on the right outcomesBring the designers’ toolkit to the rest of your product teamShare your insights with your team much earlier in the processCreate Minimum Viable Products to determine which ideas are validIncorporate the voice of the customer throughout the project cycleMake your team more productive: combine Lean UX with Agile’s Scrum frameworkUnderstand the organizational shifts necessary to integrate Lean UXLean UX received the 2013 Jolt Award from Dr. Dobb's Journal as the best book of the year. The publication's panel of judges chose five notable books, published during a 12-month period ending June 30, that every serious programmer should read.

    But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity.In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams.Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

    But testing is not a routine process, it's a constant exploration of methods and an evolution of good ideas.Beautiful Testing offers 23 essays from 27 leading testers and developers that illustrate the qualities and techniques that make testing an art. Through personal anecdotes, you'll learn how each of these professionals developed beautiful ways of testing a wide range of products -- valuable knowledge that you can apply to your own projects. Here's a sample of what you'll find inside:Microsoft's Alan Page shares some of his secrets about large-scale test automation.Scott Barber explains why performance testing needs to be a collaborative process, rather than simply an exercise in measuring speed.Karen Johnson describes how her professional experience intersected her personal life while testing medical software.Rex Black reveals how satisfying stakeholders for 25 years is a beautiful thingMathematician John D. Cook applies a classic definition of beauty, based on complexity and unity, to testing random number generatorsAll author royalties will be donated to the Nothing But Nets campaign to save lives by preventing malaria, a disease that kills millions of children in Africa each year.ContentsI. BEAUTIFUL TESTERS 1. Was it good for you? (Linda Wilkinson)2. Beautiful testing satisfies stakeholders (Rex Black)3. Building open source QA communities (Martin Schröder, Clint Talbert)4. Collaboration is the cornerstone of beautiful performance testing (Scott Barber)II. BEAUTIFUL PROCESS5. Just peachy: Making office software more reliable with fuzz testing (Kamran Khan)6. Bug management and test case effectiveness (Emily Chen, Brian Nitz)7. Beautiful XMPP Testing (Remko Troncon)8. Beautiful large-scale test automation (Alan Page)9. Beautiful is better than ugly (Neal Norwitz, Michelle Levesque, Jeffrey Yaskin)10. Testing a random number generator (John D. Cook)11. Change-centric testing (Murali Nandigama)12. Software in use (Karen N. Johnson)13. Software development is a creative process (Chris McMahon)14. Test-driven development: Driving new standards of beauty (Jennitta Andrea)15. Beautiful testing as the cornerstone of business success (Lisa Crispin)16. Peeling the glass onion at Socialtext (Mathew Heusser)17. Beautiful testing is efficient testing (Adam Goucher)III. BEAUTIFUL TOOLS18. Seeding bugs to find bugs: Beautiful mutation testing (Andreas Zeller, David Schuler)19. Reference testing as beautiful testing (Clint Talbert)20. CLAM Anti-virus: testing open source with open tools (Tomasz Kojm)21. Web application testing with Windmill (Adam Christian)22. Testing one million web pages (Tim Riley)23. Testing Network Services in Multimachine Scenarios (Isaac Clerencia)ContributorsIndex

    It provides a high-productivity programming model that promotes cleaner code architecture, test-driven development, and powerful extensibility, combined with all the benefits of ASP.NET.ASP.NET MVC 4 contains a number of significant advances over previous versions. New mobile and desktop templates (employing adaptive rendering) are included together with support for jQuery Mobile for the first time. New display modes allow your application to select views based on the browser that's making the request while Code Generation Recipes for Visual Studio help you auto-generate project-specific code for a wide variety of situtations including NuGet support.In this fourth edition, the core model-view-controller (MVC) architectural concepts are not simply explained or discussed in isolation, but are demonstrated in action. You'll work through an extended tutorial to create a working e-commerce web application that combines ASP.NET MVC with the latest C# language features and unit-testing best practices. By gaining this invaluable, practical experience, you'll discover MVC's strengths and weaknesses for yourself--and put your best-learned theory into practice.The book's authors, Steve Sanderson and Adam Freeman, have both watched the growth of ASP.NET MVC since its first release. Steve is a well-known blogger on the MVC Framework and a member of the Microsoft Web Platform and Tools team. Adam started designing and building web applications 15 years ago and has been responsible for some of the world's largest and most ambitious projects. You can be sure you are in safe hands.

    This practical, practitioner-oriented guide explains how to design successful architectures for information systems and to see these through to their successful implementation.

    First you'll learn how to apply BDD to requirements analysis to define features that focus your development efforts on underlying business goals. Then, you'll discover how to automate acceptance criteria and use tests to guide and report on the development process. Along the way, you'll apply BDD principles at the coding level to write more maintainable and better documented code.Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.About the TechnologyYou can't write good software if you don't understand what it's supposed to do. Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) encourages teams to use conversation and concrete examples to build up a shared understanding of how an application should work and which features really matter. With an emerging body of best practices and sophisticated new tools that assist in requirement analysis and test automation, BDD has become a hot, mainstream practice.About the BookBDD in Action teaches you BDD principles and practices and shows you how to integrate them into your existing development process, no matter what language you use. First, you'll apply BDD to requirements analysis so you can focus your development efforts on underlying business goals. Then, you'll discover how to automate acceptance criteria and use tests to guide and report on the development process. Along the way, you'll apply BDD principles at the coding level to write more maintainable and better documented code. No prior experience with BDD is required.What's InsideBDD theory and practiceHow BDD will affect your teamBDD for acceptance, integration, and unit testingExamples in Java, .NET, JavaScript, and moreReporting and living documentationAbout the AuthorJohn Ferguson Smart is a specialist in BDD, automated testing, and software lifecycle development optimization. Table of ContentsPART 1: FIRST STEPSBuilding software that makes a differenceBDD—the whirlwind tourPART 2: WHAT DO I WANT? DEFINING REQUIREMENTS USING BDDUnderstanding the business goals: Feature Injection and related techniquesDefining and illustrating featuresFrom examples to executable specificationsAutomating the scenariosPART 3: HOW DO I BUILD IT? CODING THE BDD WAYFrom executable specifications to rock-solid automated acceptance testsAutomating acceptance criteria for the UI layerAutomating acceptance criteria for non-UI requirementsBDD and unit testingPART 4: TAKING BDD FURTHERLiving Documentation: reporting and project managementBDD in the build process

    Previously undocumented, these 23 patterns allow designers to create more flexible, elegant, and ultimately reusable designs without having to rediscover the design solutions themselves.The authors begin by describing what patterns are and how they can help you design object-oriented software. They then go on to systematically name, explain, evaluate, and catalog recurring designs in object-oriented systems. With Design Patterns as your guide, you will learn how these important patterns fit into the software development process, and how you can leverage them to solve your own design problems most efficiently. Each pattern describes the circumstances in which it is applicable, when it can be applied in view of other design constraints, and the consequences and trade-offs of using the pattern within a larger design. All patterns are compiled from real systems and are based on real-world examples. Each pattern also includes code that demonstrates how it may be implemented in object-oriented programming languages like C++ or Smalltalk.

    

    You'll find the latest methodologies for the design of effective test cases, including information on psychological and economic principles, managerial aspects, test tools, high-order testing, code inspections, and debugging. Accessible, comprehensive, and always practical, this edition provides the key information you need to test successfully, whether a novice or a working programmer. Buy your copy today and end up with fewer bugs tomorrow.

    With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it.Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general -- all from information that you and others collect every day. Each algorithm is described clearly and concisely with code that can immediately be used on your web site, blog, Wiki, or specialized application. This book explains:Collaborative filtering techniques that enable online retailers to recommend products or media Methods of clustering to detect groups of similar items in a large dataset Search engine features -- crawlers, indexers, query engines, and the PageRank algorithm Optimization algorithms that search millions of possible solutions to a problem and choose the best one Bayesian filtering, used in spam filters for classifying documents based on word types and other features Using decision trees not only to make predictions, but to model the way decisions are made Predicting numerical values rather than classifications to build price models Support vector machines to match people in online dating sites Non-negative matrix factorization to find the independent features in a dataset Evolving intelligence for problem solving -- how a computer develops its skill by improving its own code the more it plays a game Each chapter includes exercises for extending the algorithms to make them more powerful. Go beyond simple database-backed applications and put the wealth of Internet data to work for you. "Bravo! I cannot think of a better way for a developer to first learn these algorithms and methods, nor can I think of a better way for me (an old AI dog) to reinvigorate my knowledge of the details."-- Dan Russell, Google "Toby's book does a great job of breaking down the complex subject matter of machine-learning algorithms into practical, easy-to-understand examples that can be directly applied to analysis of social interaction across the Web today. If I had this book two years ago, it would have saved precious time going down some fruitless paths."-- Tim Wolters, CTO, Collective Intellect

    People need to be effective.Productivity books focus on doing more, Jim and Tonianne want you to focus on doing better. Personal Kanban is about choosing the right work at the right time. Recognizing why we do the things we do. Understanding the impact of our actions. Creating value - not just product. For ourselves, our families, our friends, our co-workers. For our legacy.Personal Kanban takes the same Lean principles from manufacturing that led the Japanese auto industry to become a global leader in quality, and applies them to individual and team work. Personal Kanban asks only that we visualize our work and limit our work-in-progress. Visualizing work allows us to transform our conceptual and threatening workload into an actionable, context-sensitive flow. Limiting our work-in-progress helps us complete what we start and understand the value of our choices. Combined, these two simple acts encourage us to improve the way we work and the way we make choices to balance our personal, professional, and social lives.Neither a prescription nor a plan, Personal Kanban provides a light, actionable, achievable framework for understanding our work and its context. This book describes why students, parents, business leaders, major corporations, and world governments all see immediate results with Personal Kanban.