Welcome to this month’s collection of a few interesting software development news stories from the last few weeks. If you want to check out April’s news digest, simply click on the following link. Hopefully, the content within this May digest offers a measure of insight for your software engineering activities. Good luck!
Nearing its second decade of use, Agile is finally seeing wide adoption in software development at government agencies. Doug Robinson, the executive director of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) in the United States reported that 81 percent of state CIOs plan on increasing the usage of Agile and other iterative development methodologies at their shops. News about this Agile implementation growth appeared this week at CRN.
“We’re seeing a lot of excitement in the CIO world to be able to deliver projects on time and within budget using some type of agile methodology,” said Robinson. As government entities tend to be slow to embrace new technology methodologies, this growth in adoption is another obvious sign of the continued maturity of Agile.
Teams with a small number of developers produce more secure applications compared to groups with more than 20 employees. That is one of the main conclusions from the recently released 2017 CRASH Report, published by CAST Software. As applications grow in size and complexity, they simply become too difficult to manage.
A chief scientist at CAST Software, Bill Curtis, commented on the survey’s findings. “Applications have gotten so big and complex that no single team can understand it all. It might have five or six languages, multiple databases, CRM systems, and you can’t understand all the interactions. That leaves teams making assumptions that in many cases are wrong,” said Curtis.
Shops wanting to write more secure code need to invest in the relevant training for their developers, while giving them the tools for performing both static and dynamic testing. Additionally, involving a third-party team in the final vetting of an application’s security offers a valuable second opinion before the code is deployed to production.
Considering Microsoft’s investment in its own source control systems, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that the tech giant is migrating all the source code for its Windows operating system to the popular open source tool, Git. News about this move appeared this week in Ars Technica.
The reasoning behind this shift lies within Microsoft’s OneCore project which is aimed at simplifying the Windows codebase. Their previous source control solution for Windows, SourceDepot, was straining to handle the massive amount of source code involved, which includes 3.5 million files.
Redmond chose Git because of developer familiarity as well as its open source nature. The basic Git application needed to be updated to seamlessly handle the Windows source code. Microsoft created a fork in the Git code for this purpose and is talking with the other industry giants who use the app – Google and Facebook – about combining their efforts in the future.
Make a visit to the Betica Blog part of your daily routine before firing up your IDE in the morning. As always, thanks for reading!
Posted on May 26, 2017 Categories News, Software Development Tags Agile, git, government software development, Microsoft, Security, Software Development, software engineering, windows