Agility is a toolbox of practices dedicated to individuals, working software, customer collaboration and response to change. Yes, those are the values of the Agile manifesto.

No it’s not a method; it’s an approach. It isn’t only used in development, like Scrum; it can also be used for business management and for running analyses.

In his blog, Jurgen Appelo attempted to create a list of those Agile practices, some of which can be controversial. We might not agree with all of them but he does deserve credit for creating the list nonetheless.

Among those practices, two can be successfully combined to handle business requirements in an Agile organisation: User stories and Behaviour Driven Development.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since Adobe decided to move Flex into the Open Source world late last year, many people have been involved in discussions about the company’s move.  This decision has made some people think that Flex is dying.

When I mention Open Source to almost anyone other than a computer expert, it’s likely that the response will be: “What’s Open Source?”

To try and put it in simple words, Open Source software is free and generally available on the internet. It is also normally distributed with its underlying code, or source code, which a knowledgeable programmer can read and modify to meet specific business needs; unlike commercial software that is sold only in a compiled executable version.

Nowadays many people are giving HTML5 a shot instead of Flex because they think it’s the technology that is going to stick, but it may still be too early to switch. Most of them don’t pay much attention to the fact that, at the time this post is being written, fewer than 5 percent of browsers support HTML5. A simple search on the internet will give you several reasons to reconsider, or at least think twice, before going ahead with HTML5 as an alternative to Flex. This will most definitely change in the next couple of years, but even then it is likely that we go through  a few HTML5 iterations before it is widely supported.

I am a believer that a war between the technologies should never occur. Anyone who rules out one of the technologies is not necessarily doing you a disservice, but, as for any project, the pros and cons should always be considered. There will always be the argument to use Flex for several reasons, such as the code is much nicer, and it has far better object-oriented and pattern support.

Read the rest of this entry »

Users expect the same level of user experience as they consume your web content from any kind of computer devices, either for desktop or mobile use. But how can we then keep-up designing web interfaces for a constantly growing number of computer/mobile devices with different screen sizes, different resolutions, and different orientations?

Although it is preferable to design for the main two to three kinds (desktops, mobile phones, tablets) because use-cases vary considerably according to the context of use, budgets don’t always allocate for this to happen. So if the kind of project you’re working on allows it, you may consider adopting a responsive design approach.

Responsive design is a term that Ethan Marcotte* developed to describe a design that responds according to the medium that is used to view it. It isn’t a matter of just making the layout flexible as we use to do, but it is more about creating a fluid grid on which images and text behave appropriately. For example, instead of scaling down an image to the point where it loses its relevance, the trick is to hide or reveal portion of an image as you minimize the screen size. It is also about reordering and re-stacking navigation items and boxes of content on the flexible grid instead of scaling everything down. You can achieve this using a flexible grid-based layout, context-aware images and media queries (CSS3 module) to style the pages according to specific rules.

Here are some examples:
http://bostonglobe.com/
http://colly.com/
http://foodsense.is/

This technique works in most modern browsers (Safari (desktop, iPhone, iPad), Chrome, Internet Explorer (8+), Opera) and unsurprisingly degrades in other browsers, such as IE7 and under.

To find out more about this topic:
http://filamentgroup.com/lab/responsive_images_experimenting_with_context_aware_image_sizing/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design

Reference:
*Ethan Marcotte is a Web Designer and Developer based in Boston

9h30 – “Ok, let’s do the stand up!”

Between five to 10 people promptly gather around the whiteboard every morning and give updates on their work, raise flags when they are blocked or when they need help… who is to say that agile projects are chaotic?

For the past couple of months, I have been working on a long-term project that has been managed in an “agile” way, and have discovered many pros and some cons along the way. The biggest success, from my perspective at least, is to see how easily you can implement a user-centered design approach into an agile development environment if a few factors come together:

• There is a general understanding amongst the team members that producing a usable and pleasing product is a top priority.
• The analysis phase is not skipped in the process and time is allowed to really understand the business rules, users and their context of use.
• The user experience (UX) always works one or two sprints ahead while verifying work done in the previous one and discussing implementation questions for the current one.

Below is a diagram I created that illustrates the last point and explains how UX and development collaborate across the sprints:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been spending a fair bit of “quality” time recently with Microsoft’s customer relationship management (CRM) product – a solution that was released at the start of 2011 as part of their Microsoft Dynamics suite of tools.

As with any new main product there’s a wealth of online information. So here’s a quick introduction to the product to help you to get oriented amidst that mass of information, and to quickly become a CRM-expert for the next pub-quiz/game-show you attend! Some useful references are provided at the end.

This, then, is the ABC of CRM.

Read the rest of this entry »

I felt pretty self-conscious as I sat down to lunch at WHO.  I was dining with about 20 academic nutritionists and I’d just realized that they had all chosen salads and water whilst I tucked into a particularly fatty steak, chips and bottle of fizzy orange (followed by a particularly obscene bar of chocolate).  I was suffering this professional scrutiny of my lamentable eating habits for the Optifood project, a WHO initiative in which b-i is working in close collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the USAID-funded Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance II (FANTA-2) project to create a diet analysis tool.

The project has pretty lofty aims – it hopes to revolutionize the way that nutritionists formulate recommendations to place their work on a sound mathematical footing.  It came as quite a surprise to me to learn that professional nutritionists have very little in the way of existing tools to help formulate food-based dietary recommendations.  Just how do they formulate food-based recommendations for a particular group of children who are deficient in iron and once identified how do they know that the iron-rich foods they recommend won’t leave the children deficient in another key nutrient?  Such analysis can be done but it is often very lengthy and time-consuming – finding just the right combination of foods to provide the required amount of up to 20 key nutrients.  It’s akin to solving several dozen equations at the same time and finding the best compromise between each.

Read the rest of this entry »

In today’s information technology projects, all project managers know the critical importance of performing important code coverage on their team’s code. Indeed, this investment is costly in terms of development time, but the return on investment is proven since we know that the real main cost of the application is the one for its maintenance, and not the one for its development.

On their end, the developers have also understood that testing their code allows them to detect errors in their programming much more quickly and to insure themselves that their work is of good quality. The tests also allow the developers to guarantee that the behavior of their code will remain consistent even if another member of the development team had to correct or modify it.

The testing also forces the engineer to simplify his or her code in order to make it easier to test, keeping true to the leitmotiv “Keep it simple.” The methods are short, have limited responsibilities, and are less complex. By keeping things simple, it is also easier for the developer to Mock the behaviors for which the part with tested code is not responsible.

This article will, therefore, talk about “Mocking” but from an unusual perspective.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two years ago, I was involved in a project for a luxury company. The previous project manager had used Scrum as a tool to manage the project and the deliverables. After a quick introduction to this methodology, I used his tools (mainly Excel) to implement Scrum.

Today I would like to reuse Scrum in another project, but I wanted to see if it was possible to use Microsoft Project instead of Excel to manage Scrum artifacts such as Product backlog, Sprint Backlog and the Burn down chart.

Note that this article will not explain the methodology; you can check this article in Wikipedia or watch this interesting video by Hamid Shojaee for a quick course on Scrum.

Read the rest of this entry »

blue-infinity is not just keeping up with the latest trends and technologies: It’s at the forefront of technological knowledge. We focus on what will bring added value to our customers.

Jan Stenvall, a blue-infinity Java consultant, has written a White Paper covering the subject of JavaFX. The reason for the White Paper is to keep colleagues and customers abreast of these trends and technologies to bring clarity and guidance for future investments and decisions.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not uncommon to be on conference calls these days. What with the economy making business trips for short meetings a thing of the past, and new technologies with video conferencing making talking to one another not in person more like you’re face to face, we have come to a time when conference calls have become an important, if not crucial, part of any organization or company, especially whilst conducting business globally.

Have you ever been on a conference call where someone was snoring? I have. Have you ever been on a call where someone’s kids were screaming in the background? I have. Have you ever been on a call where the other person’s accent was very difficult to understand, you couldn’t hear them properly, and there was so much background noise both on their line and in your office that you couldn’t concentrate? I have. And I don’t think I’m the only one.

It seems that even though, or perhaps because, conference calls are getting more and more common, people don’t take them as seriously as they should. In a “normal” meeting, do these things happen as often? When you’re face to face with someone, do you really speak like that?

Here are some simple tips to make sure you don’t push people’s buttons when you’re on the line (or how to be professional about conference calling):

Read the rest of this entry »

After recently misplacing a USB drive (luckily already encrypted), I decided to put  together a quick guide for anyone interested in securing their data on USB/Local drives through encryption, using free tools available for download. 

These days everyone stores huge amounts of data on USB drives (be it small pen drives or larger hard drives reaching 1TB or more). We carry this information around in our pockets everywhere, sharing with co-workers and friends, at our clients and perhaps even in public locations.

The main question you should ask yourself from a security standpoint is “What stops somebody from connecting to your drive and viewing/stealing/destroying your data?  

Remember the old DOS command format L:\ /q (this one quickly deletes Gigabytes of data in seconds – of course we could use tools to recover at the expense of your administrator’s time and nerves..).

  Read the rest of this entry »

For those without Microsoft Project Server, here is a way to manage shared resources through various projects. Through the use of this method, the program manager or unit manager is able to check team member allocation and also plan projects.

 Firstly, you will need to create the resource pool by following the steps detailed below:

Read the rest of this entry »

Adobe has announced that they stopped Flash Player development on mobiles. I’ve been hearing so much noise around this that I think it needs some explanation.

Adobe has stopped Flash Player on mobiles. That’s all. Nothing more. It means that Flash Player won’t be updated for mobile plateforms but let’s face it: Nobody developed Flash Websites for mobiles…

On the contrary, Adobe bought phoneGap last month and clearly turned its strategy to focus on mobile apps (phoneGap AND Air) rather than Flash-based websites for mobiles.

However, this doesn’t mean that they have killed Flash for desktops!  Flash is going to turn into a “shockwave like” technology, more dedicated to 3D than to simple animations.

Mobile development is split in two different parts: Apps and Web.

• Applications are built either with native or hybrid technologies. Applications are very popular because they are fast, can be used offline. Pure HTML5 for example isn’t robust enough to handle the work for the time being.
• Web on mobile is built with HTML/javascript.  Again, HTML5 is the future but just can’t handle as many features as Flash or apps for the moment.

So what kind of technology choices do we have for mobile?

Firstly, we have agnostic technologies. By “agnostic”, I mean one source code for several mobile OS. Adobe Air is one of these technologies (just like SUP, Unity, etc), and a good one if you know how to work with it. And… Adobe Air is just a container for Flash/Flex!

Secondly there are hybrid apps, which are typically developed using HTML5/JQuery, with native extensions provided, for example, by Adobe’s phoneGap. Hybrid apps have been recommended by Forrester over native developments (see next point).

Thirdly we have native apps, which in my opinion kill the ability to make applications that work across devices and therefore are not great for the consumer.  It could be justified on rare occasions, for example when you need to use a feature that exists on the hardware, like NFC.

So Flash is dead on mobiles (and TVs), but long live Flash for mobile apps.

PS: You want to use your Flex/Flash talents to develop mobile? Hey, you know what? Adobe has an app for that!

Gartner has listed tablets and mobile-centric applications as the top two technology trends for 2012, stating that “The implications for IT is that the era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is one of a variety of environments IT will need to support.”

CIO magazine says: “Mobile applications must be as effective as their desktop and notebook counterparts. “Getting mobile right requires a broad range of device support, a central point of control, a wide security net that ensures corporate data is never compromised, and the ability to shield end users from integration complexities.”

The term “mobile” now encompasses such a broad range of facets that it has become a subject related to the underlying IT architecture of a company, thus representing challenges for both IT and business, who need to work together to maximise efficiency, adoption and return.

The following are three common and basic challenges explained in simple terms:

• The choice of mobile devices for employees
• The management of the mobile fleet
• The choice of application development tools

1.      Choice of mobile devices – data security

Implementing a coherent policy for mobile phones and tablets is a major concern, as the choice has a direct impact on data security.

Should employees be allowed access to systems using their personal smartphones? Should the company provide separate smartphones to its employees for business purposes? If so, can we and should we allow employees to use these smartphones for personal use as well, without compromising data security?

Several factors need to be analysed in order to make such decisions, such as:

What type of smartphones/platforms can the IT department manage? iOS? Android?  Windows Phone? Blackberry? Even though other mobile platforms exist, the trend leans clearly to these market leaders. Even if Microsoft is a little behind at the moment, the teams in Richmond are working hard to catch up.

What kind of devices are your employees using already? Adoption is a key factor. The mobile trend is completely driven by consumer behaviour.

The choice of a mobile fleet management tool also has a huge impact on the choice of devices. I’ve gone into more details in the next point..

2.      Mobile Device Management

Commonly known as MDM, this is the corner stone of a corporate mobile policy. It’s through this solution that we can manage users, access to application, configuration, loss, theft, etc.

How to make the choice?

Go through a proper analysis phase. There are a few major players in this domain, as well as some very interesting niche solutions (refer to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant). In seeing the numbers of big players who are racing to offer these solutions, there is no doubt that the future of MDM is looking bright, and choices will open up even more.

 3.      Developing Applications

The move to mobile in the enterprise will be boosted by the use of tablets,  and users will want an increasing number of business applications to run on these devices. Will you develop web applications or native applications?

How will you develop a corporate strategy that dictates the choice of development tools?

From my perspective, companies should be pragmatic:

• What kind of resources do you have internally to manage the development life-cycle? How will you train them?
• How do you choose suppliers who have mastered this domain?
• How to deal with the pro/perso concern?

  In conclusion, defining a mobile policy should be taken seriously, as it will have a real daily impact on life within your company. Enterprise mobility is the biggest single trend across tech industry investment and innovation, even outpacing the cloud computing trend, states the Forrester report entitled, “Another Year of Outperformance for the Tech Industry — Forrester’s 2011 Tech Industry Predictions.” Analysts predict that by 2014, the primary method of accessing the internet will be through mobile devices, which will increasingly replace the traditional desktop.

The risk of not having a solid corporate strategy could be costly:

• Disruption of business processes: The functional failure of  IT systems—of which mobile apps are now solidly included.
• High cost: An ad hoc approach to building out the mobile application architecture will eventually result in time-consuming, manual intervention to maintain.
• Lack of business agility: A poorly planned mobile architecture that cannot support dynamic business strategy shifts can hold the entire business back.

Insights for Java developers

In July this year Oracle announced the availability of Java 7. More than 4 years have passed since the previous release, so what sort of improvements can we expect? Programmers will find several kinds of new features, from cosmetic ones to essential development APIs. Discover more here…

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week Adobe developers pushed out  release candidate versions of the new AIR SDK and Flash Player 11. 
These two major developments contain an unsurprisingly exhaustive list of new enhanced features and performance improvements, across mobile, desktop and TV; but here I’ll focus on what I consider to be the most exciting developments.

One of the key features of AIR 3 is the Native Extensions (for mobile), which now allows developers to extend runtime with ActionScript libraries and native code, taking advantage of the built-in features of each platform and device specific capabilities. Whilst it’s a big step in terms of the previous limitations, one code won’t fit them all, and the native portions of an extension are written with the corresponding development tool.”

The mobile part of the SDK also includes the Stage Video Hardware Acceleration, which improves the high definition video playback experience - something which I thought was pretty poor on iOS with AIR2.7. Security has also been improved, with Encrypted Local Storage now available when storing sensitive data on the phone. In regards to iOS support, Background Audio Playback has been added, and we also have at last the Front-facing Camera Support on Android!

Adobe didn’t forget about desktops and T.V., with Stage 3D offering a brand new architecture for 2D/3D accelerated graphics rendering – this exciting new feature is also a part of the Flash Player 11 release note.

Others key benefits of the 11th version of Flash Player are the Native 64-bit support (Windows, Mac & Linux), a new JPEG-XR compression format and support for the efficient H.264 video standard.

The release notes containing the full list of new features can be viewed here. 

If you would like to give AIR3 a try, it can be downloaded from Adobe Labs, whereas Flash Player 11 can be found here.

Programming without code? Well…

Five months after releasing Wallaby, an experimental tool designed to convert Flash animations to HTML5, Adobe has once again established it’s position as a major player in Web technologies with Edge.

Adobe Edge allows you to create rich animation directly in HTML5 (using CSS and Javascript) without a line of code.  

It reminds me of Flash in the late 90′s, but can be run on mobile devices which do not currently support Adobe’s Flash player.
 

Basically it’s pretty much the same; creating a new project will open a blank “stage” in which you can import image files (JPG, GIF, PNG or SVG) and add basic shapes and texts. The properties of each type of asset can be modified (transparency, size, position, colour etc.) and animated using “keyframes” within the timeline. The animation preview is rendered using Webkit, and Adobe claim the animations have been tested on Android, iOS, and other Webkit-based browers along with Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer 9. 

Publishing your animation will result in a bundle of files: HTML, CSS and Javascript; and it appears that it can be easily integrated into an existing HTML file without change. Its currently a preview version and is far from being perfect, but what we are seeing at will release another preview or (fingers-crossed!) a final release.

With the technology only in the preview stage, industry voices are expressing mixed opinions about Edge. According to netmagazine.com, there are concerns regarding the absence of SVG and canvas, which many would expect from a HMTL5 tool. Adobe have responded by reassuring developers that this is by no means a complete product, and that Edge will be evolving rapidly. We will have to wait and see what happens; in the meantime, this discussion can be followed over at the Edge forum.

Adobe offers an overview of Edge in the video they released in late June (below), however you can now also download the preview version from Adobe Labs and give it a try – let us know your thoughts!

The competition

Jurackerfest.ch, which took place on August 27th, was part of the first edition of Jura Security Days. This event was organized by BIMO (www.bimo.ch), whose aim is to promote quality software development, and featured conferences running throughout Friday and Saturday. The white-hat hacking competition was organized by SCRT (www.scrt.ch) who are the organizers of the renowned Insomni’Hack.

In the morning we practiced on specially crafted websites designed with specific errors to give participants an idea of what they would be facing during the contest. After a brief lunch break, we were given two hours to solve a set of 10 varied problems, ranging from a (fairly simple) protocol hack, to an exercise in steganography which no team managed to solve in the timeframe given.

The atmosphere

Arriving early, the competition room was fairly empty and quiet, but as the starting time neared, it quickly becamecrowded and lively. Participants came from an array of different backgrounds; there was a technical school teacher with about fifteen of his pupils, quite a few qualified and experienced developers, a few security experts and lambda citizens interested to pick up a few things along the way…

The buzzing of laptop fans and the smell of energy drinks was overpowering!

The funniest part of it all was that in order to prove that one had indeed found a solution; one had to explain how it was found. And as the solutions themselves usually consisted of random characters, people were constantly running to the referee table with their laptops in their hands, to be able to show both the solution and how they had found it!

The team

Competing with me was Nicolas Heiniger, currently working in IT security for the Hôpital du Jura. We studied at the EPFL together and spent many exercise sessions tuning our brains to work together (along with three more classmates, who could unfortunately not make it). Knowing each other’s strengths allowed us to split the challenges efficiently.

Nicolas was running a Linux Backtrack distribution (a dedicated penetration testing OS), while I was running Ubuntu Natty almost out-of-the-box (with zsh and vim added to it).

A sample challenge

Out of the ten challenges:

• One was a cypher to decode (a variation on a Cesar cypher)
• Two were oriented towards reverse engineering
• Two were so-called “trivia” challenges (steganography concepts actually)
• And the last five were web oriented (e.g. hacking a JavaScript authentication, overriding a htaccess authentication, a SQLi hack for a database authentication…)

One of the reverse engineering challenges consisted of finding the password verified by a python function.

The source file, which we were given, wasn’t too complex (remember we only had two hours to solve ten challenges):

• When run, it checked that the number of arguments was correct and if so, started verifying the user input – if not, it printed usage instructions.
• The verification consisted of a series of tests, based (amongst others) on comparisons between the value of an internal variable and the position of one character of the input string in the ASCII table (i.e. the value of the corresponding byte).

One of the tests (the last one) checked that the length of the input was exactly seven. Working backwards from there (and with the help of an ASCII table), we were able to work out that the code was Jc4HAcK.

My conclusion

All in all, a very fun day and a thrilling experience (more in my league than extreme sports, admittedly). And a surprisingly satisfying outcome, since Nicolas and I were first-timers in an ethical hacking contest. Next time though (andyes, there WILL be a next time), I’ll make sure I have all the necessary tools installed before going, rather than lamenting not having Internet access from there!

 PS: How did we fare?

Well, we were proud 3^rd place winners… and got our pictures in the local papers! View the article (in French).

Real Mobility.

The ‘Cloud’ is the buzz word in technology circles right now, but how can it really help me and my business in our daily activities?

Our e-life revolves around communication, content and collaboration. In the past, most of the tools/data related to these activities were hosted on a single computer,whereas now you have multiple electronic handles, and synchronization can turn into a nightmare: there is always missing data, because it is hosted êlsewhere.

Google Apps solves this problem simply..

Read the rest of this entry »