Welcome to the June edition of the Betica Blog software development news digest. We hope this month’s stories provide a measure of insight and inspiration to compliment your daily work routine. If you are interested in checking out last month’s stories, including the increased use of Agile at government agencies and Microsoft embracing Git, simply click on the following link.
Companies continue to leverage Cloud-based services to make their software development processes more efficient. This trend was reported on earlier this month at the blog for the document management software company, Formtek, as well as other sources.
This migration to the Cloud is a natural outgrowth of organizations increasingly adopting Agile, DevOps, and other modern development frameworks with the hopes of achieving continuous integration or to simply deliver software faster. Some of these Cloud-based services include containers and virtualized server environments, as well as QA and database services.
Formtek explains that because many development companies are actually writing software to be run in the Cloud, it makes using Cloud-based tools a natural fit. This fact is highlighted in their three top reasons why software engineering becomes more efficient in the Cloud. In short, developers are already using the Cloud in their daily work; they want to use new tools which are largely Cloud-based, and DevOps and Continuous Delivery largely depend on Cloud-based tools.
The future of software development is quite cloudy, indeed.
While NVIDIA is primarily known as a developer of graphics processor chip technology, the company is working with Volvo and two other companies on a driverless car system. News about this futuristic consortium first appeared this week in Forbes.
The heart of this new technology is NVIDIA’s Drive PX automotive computing platform. The company’s graphics processing background comes into play with Drive PX’s auto-pilot functionality, which is able to read real-time information from 12 HD cameras, processing 1.3 gigapixels of graphics data per second. The system uses dual high-powered Tegra X1 chips, capable of recording two 4K streams at a refresh rate of 30Hz.
Software routines using AI and deep learning are able to make intelligent decisions based on all that graphical data. This facilitates object detection while allowing for the automated control of the vehicle. The first driverless cars from the Volvo/NVIDIA group are expected to hit the marketplace by the end of 2021.
As software companies hope to improve their QA processes, a new form of quality assurance – crowdtesting – is growing in relevance. Applause, a company involved in the practice, recently described how it works on its ARC website.
At its essence, crowdtesting uses the targeted audience demographic of an app as part of its testing team. The hope is to have the QA process mimic the real world environment of a website or mobile app as closely as possible. Applause currently has over 300,000 testers available across the world, so it is able to match a group of testers to most applications.
It will be interesting to see if crowdtesting becomes part of the QA mainstream in the next few years.
Stay tuned to the Betica Blog for additional news and insights from the constantly evolving world of software development and QA. As always, thanks for reading!