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No. 11 • May 2013 • www.todaysoftmag.ro • www.todaysoftmag.com

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Functional Programming in Haskell Big data and Hadoop Sustainable architecture Let’s not forget about Silicon Valley OPTIONSABILITY - A discrete feature of IT projects a friend for startups The Cluj IT History (V) Lessons learned from “Junimea”

Towards An It Community – Via HR Test Automation Orchestration Book review: RESTful Web Services Cookbook by Subbu Allamaraju Developing safety-critical software with SCADE Performance Management The Imagine Cup Rollercoaster Gogu and the gas filling

6 Let’s not forget about Silicon Valley Bogdan Iordache

8 a friend for startups Cosmin Mihaiu

9 The Cluj IT History (V) Lessons learned from “Junimea” Marius Mornea

11 Software Craftsmanship

29 Developing safety-critical software with SCADE Hunor Csomortani

32 Big data and Hadoop Radu Vunvulea

35 Functional Programming in Haskell Mihai Maruseac

38 Book review: RESTful Web Services Cookbook by Subbu Allamaraju

Alexandru Bolboacă and Adrian Bolboacă

Silviu Dumitrescu

14 From The Software Architect’s Kitchen – Scenario Cards

40 Towards An It Community – Via HR

Attila Antal

17 Sustainable architecture (grow from novice to guru) Levente Veres

20 Testing in the Cloud Vlad Zeciu

22 Test Automation Orchestration Lucian Revnic

22 OPTIONSABILITY - A discrete feature of IT projects Bogdan Matei

Dan Ionescu and Cristina Nicule

43 Performance Management Andreea Pârvu

45 Maybe, but probably not!

Antonia Onaca

46 The Imagine Cup Rollercoaster Alex Pana

48 Gogu and the gas filling Simona Bonghez, Ph.D.

editorial

T

Ovidiu Măţan, PMP

ovidiu.matan@todaysoftmag.com Editor-in-chief @ Today Software Magazine

4

he buzz of the last months is the creation of structures and opportunities for IT development and maybe more than ever the emergence of some Romanian solutions through the stimulation of startups. TSM has been and remains their promoter, but we do not wish to fall to the other extreme and not to see the forest for the trees.

Probably 90% of the IT zone, excepting the affairs with the Romanian state, represents outsourcing done for companies abroad. The main problem that emerges is the lack of IP (intellectual property), as the respective companies can at anytime move their development centers elsewhere. On the other hand, let’s not lose sight of what the outsourcing companies have done for us and what they still can do. First of all, they taught us how to write commercial soft, which is the required level of quality, 99.999% for availability, how to create an efficient architecture of systems and much more. In time, these were assimilated by the Romanian specialists and now we are teaching others. The same is about to happen to the creation of products. The companies which until not long ago only carried their projects into execution in Romania, now trust us and want us to create the products of which they are business owners. This can be seen on the labour market, and the lack of business analysts and of product management does not escape observation. There are not many, but there will be in a few years and they will write in their CV the execution of some important products. They will know how to create a commercial product based on business requirements and probably they will also help promoting the Romanian startups.

Thus, in order to have on a large scale the emergence of new startups, we need a culture and an experience which can be reached only in time and with a lot of perseverance.

Of course, there can be exceptions, as the ones we saw in the industry of games or in that of entertainment. The incubators of startups and the co-work areas timidly begin to make their appearance and, starting with the next issue, we will begin to publish an analysis of the existing ones. It is important for a new startup to know from the beginning whom to address for finance or support.

As we have expected, the month of May is full of events in the IT zone: on the 14th of May we have the Software architecture workshop, organized by Arobs, which has Simion Brown as a guest; on the 16th of May, still in Cluj, the second edition of the Romanian Testing Community will take place; on the 17th of May .msg systems organizes the Java EE 7 workshop, held by Silviu Dumitrescu; on the 23rd-24th of May we will have the IT Camp, the biggest conference on Microsoft technologies in Romania and on the 30th-31st of May, I T.A.K.E Unconference takes place in Bucharest, for those who wish to achieve technical excellence. I would also like to mention the ICT Spring Europe which will take place on the 19th-20th of June, in Luxembourg. The event will reunite 3,500 participants from Europe and for the startups there is no participation fee.

They will have the opportunity to present their solutions within the event. Those who wish only to participate in the event will be granted a 50% discount by TSM. Those who are interested, please contact us at the following address: contact@todaysoftmag.com.

Number 11 TSM suggests a series of interesting articles covering the area of interest in this field. In the startup section, the article Let’s forget the Silicon Valley pattern (aka Prince Charming of the Valley and the Silicon Apples) is an objective analysis of this phenomenon. A friend of startups is about Marius Mocian and the support he has offered to MIRA. This section ends with the winners of this year’s Microsoft Imagine Cup, who recount to us the evolution of the product from concept to its final implementation.

Software Craftsmanship is a domain hardly known and I am glad that we are able to publish an article on this subject. Software architecture is present in the articles: From the kitchen of the software architect, script cards and Extransible and lasting architecture (grow from novice to guru). OPTIONSABILITY is an interesting subject related to the IT projects. We continue with The Development of safety-critical applications in SCADE and a new series about Functional Programming in Haskell. The first results of the study for the completion of some Best Practices in HR are published in Towards the IT community – via HR, and our favorite character, Gogu, is present in the end in Gogu and the refueling.

Enjoy your reading !

Ovidiu Măţan

no. 11/May, 2013 www.todaysoftmag.com

Editor-in-chief @Today Software Magazine

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE Editorial Staf Editor-in-chief: Ovidiu Mățan ovidiu.matan@todaysoftmag.com Editor (startups and interviews): Marius Mornea marius.mornea@todaysoftmag.com Graphic designer: Dan Hădărău dan.hadarau@todaysoftmag.com Marketing: Ioana Fane ioana.fane@todaysoftmag.com Translator: Cintia Damian cintia.damian@todaysoftmag.com Reviewer: Tavi Bolog tavi.bolog@todaysoftmag.com

Authors

Alexandru Bolboaca

Hunor Csomortani

Agile Coach and Trainer, with a focus on technical practices @Mozaic Works

Software Developer @ evoline

alex.bolboaca@mozaicworks.com

Bogdan Iordache bogdan.iordache@howtoweb.co How to Web co-founder, most important web event in Eastern Europe Silviu Dumitrescu silviu.dumitrescu@msg-systems. com Java consultant @ .msg systems Romania

csmortani.hunor@evoline.ro

Mihai Maruseac

mihai.maruseac@gmail.com IxNovation @ IXIA member of ROSEdu, ARIA

Radu Vunvulea

Radu.Vunvulea@iquestgroup.com Senior Software Engineer @iQuest

Marius Mornea

Reviewer: Adrian Lupei adrian.lupei@todaysoftmag.com Made by

marius.mornea@todaysoftmag.com Engineer intrested and involved in different IT activities, from development to, management, education to journalism as part of Epistemio, UTCN and TSM

Today Software Solutions SRL

www.todaysoftmag.com www.facebook.com/todaysoftmag twitter.com/todaysoftmag ISSN 2285 – 3502 ISSN-L 2284 – 8207

adrian.bolboaca@mozaicworks.com Programmer. Organizational and Technical Trainer and Coach @Mozaic Works

Dan Ionescu

dan.ionescu@danis.ro

Attila Antal

str. Plopilor, nr. 75/77 Cluj-Napoca, Cluj, Romania contact@todaysoftmag.com

Adrian Bolboaca

Attila.Antal@isdc.eu Software Architect @ ISDC

Executiv director @ Danis Consulting

Cristina Nicule Antonia Onaca

cristina.nicule@danis.ro

trainer and consultant

Consultant @ Danis Consulting

Levente Veres

Andreea Pârvu

anto@aha-ha.com

Levente.Veres@endava.com

andreea.parvu@endava.com Recruiter at Endava

Design Lead @ endava

Vlad Zeciu

Alex Pana

Senior QA Engineer @ Small Footprint

internship student @ Tora trading

vzeciu@smallfootprint.com

Copyright Today Software Magazine Any reproduction or total or partial reproduction of these trademarks or logos, alone or integrated with other elements without the express permission of the publisher is prohibited and engage the responsibility of the user as defined by Intellectual Property Code www.todaysoftmag.ro www.todaysoftmag.com

r.whitesoul@gmail.com

Simona Bonghez, Ph.D.

simona.bonghez@confucius.ro

Lucian Revnic

lucian.revnic@hp.com OO Content Arhitect @ HP Software Cluj

Speaker, trainer and consultant in oroject management, Owner of Confucius Consulting

Bogdan Matei

bogdan.matei@3pillarglobal.com Senior Php Developer @ 3Pillar Global

www.todaysoftmag.com | no. 11/May, 2013

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startups

Let’s not forget about Silicon Valley (aka prince Charming and the Silicon Apples)

A

lmost 60 years ago, William Shockley left Bell Laboratories and founded the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1956 in Mountain View, believing that silicon, not germanium, is the right material for the production of transistors. In 1957 eight of his engineers left the company and founded Fairchild Semiconductor and later on other two (Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore) founded Intel.

After almost 60 years, Silicon Valley includes hundreds of thousands of engineers (from a total of seven million people in Bay Area), hundreds of investment firms and accelerators that attract more than 10 billion USD in annual investment (over 40% of annual venture investment in U.S.), an exceptional educational system, that includes Stanford, one of the most important six universities of the world, and almost all tech industry giants: Intel, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Qualcomm, Yahoo! etc.

When I got to San Francisco about a month ago, the Launch Festival 2013 was taking place, one of the biggest conferences about startups in SF and I made a short clip.

Romania has to catch up. With a total of approx. 80,000 engineers, with local annual investment not exceeding 10 million dollars (maybe much less) in 2012, with an outdated and inefficient educational system that still does the job due to a low number of passionate people, with some interesting product companies (BitDefender, Avangate etc.), which constitute only 5-10% of total exports of IT & C (the rest is outsourcing), we can conclude that we have a pretty good industry, but we are several size ranges behind.

I often read articles and news about the way Bucharest, Cluj and even Magurele will become a ‘Silicon Valley’ made in Romania.

So, if it were so simple, I could even make a Silicon Valley in Turnu Severin, my hometown! It’s nice outside, so investors can visit the Herculane resort in their lunch break

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and entrepreneurs can relax at the terraces on the Danube shore. For programmers we have cheap fish, rich in phosphorus after a long working day. I suspect, however, that no one will take it seriously, as they are just figures of speech (parables, hyperbole, etc...), a comparison itself being excluded.

Chances of developing a new Silicon Valley anywhere in the world, including the USA, are extremely small, and I think we should learn what we need to learn and then forget the Silicon Valley model when we think about creating a local tech ecosystem.

Maybe we should forget about the New York model, where tech startups have developed due to the local advertising industry.

Maybe we should forget about the Israel model, the second country in the world in terms of the number of tech IPOs of companies on stock exchange in U.S. The technology industry there was primarily created by funding research in the defense industry. And maybe we should also forget about the London model, the most important European financial center where the technology industry has been developed due to accessing the existing funding ways. And the list could continue with Boulder, Berlin, Singapore and many other centers where local factors have helped the industry to grow.

Maybe we should carefully look in the mirror, ask who we really are and what we can do that is really efficient in global innovation and perform quietly for the next 20 years, with fewer stories about Prince Charming in the Valley and the Silicon

no. 11/May, 2013 | www.todaysoftmag.com

Apples. Instead, we should keep the eyes wide open towards us.

PS: All my good thoughts are heading towards Comic Con Bucharest, where I would have terribly wanted to be.

Bogdan Iordache bogdan.iordache@howtoweb.co How to Web co-founder, most important web event in Eastern Europe

LUXEMBOURG

Biz Stone Co-founder, Twitter

Trip HAWKINS Founder of Electronic Arts, CEO, Digital Chocolate

Laura Yecies CEO, SugarSync

Peter Sondergaard Senior Vice President, Research Gartner

JUNE

Ruppert Keeley CEO EMEA, Paypal

Koichiro Tsujino Founder Alex Corporation and developed VAIO, Sony, former President of Google Japon

BRIAN STEVENS CTO, Redhat

Pepe MODER

Global Director fot the Digital Marketing & Communication, Pirelli

MORE SPEAKERS ON

www.ictspring.com

ReGISTER NOW www.ictspring.com

startups

a friend for startups

W

e met Marius Mocian, marius@mocian.com, at Cluj-Napoca Business Days event in July 2012 where we had a booth to show people our product MIRA (www.mirarehab.com). After explaining to Marius what MIRA was all about, he started bringing people to our booth and discussing more about the business side of the product, rather than the technical or medical part which we were used to answering. We immediately saw that he believed in what we were doing, the potential MIRA can bring to physiotherapy and that we needed help in refining our business strategy in order to reach out to investors and transform the product into a business.

After Cluj-Napoca Business Days, Marius kept in touch with us and invited us to participate in the OpenCoffee events he organized weekly Through him, we met a lot of people in the start-up scene who, not only were kind enough to share their experiences, but also gave us advice

on how to move our business forward. No later than one month since we met Marius, he sent us an e-mail through which he encouraged us to apply to the Healthbox London Accelerator (www.healthbox.com) . Healthbox is a medical-based accelerator that was beginning in October and was probably the best shot we could have ever gotten to transform our pro duc t in a working business. We listened to his suggestion and over one mont h l ate r we received an offer to participate in the first European accelerator focused on h e a l t h . We packed our bags, went to London and formed the company now known as MIRA Rehab.

I n December 2012, Marius recommended we apply to

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no. 11/May, 2013 | www.todaysoftmag.com

Kairos 50. We listened to him again and we were invited to the Kairos Global Summit.

The Kairos Global Summit was an event in New York in February 2013, where 50 of the most innovative student-run businesses in the world were flown in to showcase their ideas at the First Floor at the New York Stock Exchange.

We appreciate Marius’ help and his persevering implication in the development of our project. Before meeting him, we already knew what direction we were going in, but he helped us make the first steps to our current business. His network of people, ambition to see other small companies grow and his general advice can help any start-up, anyone who has a good idea make the first steps to a potential success.

You can reach out to Marius Mocian through his e-mail address: marius@ mocian.com

Founders of MIRA Rehab

history

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

The Cluj IT History (V)

I

Lessons learned from “Junimea”

’ll start with Iacob Negruzzi’s closing political and economic, seems to be on our of his book: “Memories from Junimea”. side. We are a country town, away from the capital city, with a young generation of IT „When I look back, at the past life of loving men, having an above average finanJunimea, I fully convince myself that such a cial status (a national statistic places IT in society could have been formed only through the top 3 best paid industries, with Cluj the contribution of some utterly special cir- coming in second after Bucharest). I dare cumstances. A certain number of young name these contextual similarities as social men, with a shared vivid love for literature infrastructure. Looking at the differences and all intellectual endeavors, had to meet we must distance ourselves form the easy in a country town, away from the political matching of social infrastructures and take turmoil of the capital. They had to be finan- into account the utterly special instances cially independent, such as to have enough to named by Negruzzi. In order to recreate help other young men that lacked the means, them we must act on the following lessons. but had the talent and determination. It First we must recognize or peers merits, was required that Junimea’s members fully without envy. Junimea used frequent cloacknowledge each other’s merits and that sed member meetings and the presence of not a single sentiment of envy, even hidden “Literary Conversations” magazine, a very ones, muddy the constant serenity of their good tool to gather talented people, nurrelationships. Lead by such men and in such ture voices and debate with other cultural circumstances, it is not by mistake that The and university centers around the country.

Society managed to last for so long, even This combination of intensely critical priwith a complete lack of formal organization. vate communication and a common voice But identical circumstances will not repeat interfacing the general public, helped creeasily in the life of a nation and that is why a ate a united uniform society, allowing the second edition of such a society will perhaps burnishing of vanities behind closed doors, be impossible in times to come. before public exposure. There’s a similar Did Junimea have mentionable merits? individual value recognition effort in Cluj One which, as myself, played a part can through an open and active communihardly judge the value of the play in which cation between the members of different he had a lead role. Only the future will professional communities. TSM magazine rightfully judge once we will no longer exist. has as its main mission the facilitation of However, it is my belief that Junimea will this open communication and increasing hold a page in Romanian literature his- the visibility between local IT professionals, tory, because we enjoyed ourselves to much and we are joined by many others, from during our endeavors, to not bring content technical communities to guild like organiand usefulness to the general public. There zations (see Cluj IT cluster). The important will come, later on, other societies, more edu- lesson is to balance enough pride, to do cated, maybe even more active and restless, justice to our own self-esteem, but not too but there will be none which will have done much, as to fall victim to vanity and envy. such serious works in such a joyful, pleasant Even though computer programmers are a and unusual manner.” vain species, there are enough good signs of success in avoiding the fragmentation, Besides the obvious value of the above isolation and value diluting introduced by quote, we can extract some useful lessons the latter. by extrapolating to the current local IT Our progress on the next two lessons context. A simple re-reading, in which is still in its early stages: financing emerwe replace “literature” with “IT”, paints an ging talents and the joyful and fulfilling image so similar to today’s reality. A reality environment. When we refer to financing, comprised of both similarities and differen- it’s worth extending Junimea’s meaning of ces compared to the historical context of personal financial aid, because nowadays Junimea. First off, the geographical context, the investor role can be played both by

individuals and companies. It’s also worth extending the concept of talented young man, both to the IT professionals employed by companies and to the entrepreneurs of the startup scene. Regardless of the combination in which the above roles collaborate, the priority lies in fulfilling the financial investment needs and accelerating the current efforts to counter the existing exodus of local startups towards friendlier international locations. We follow Junimea’s model in educating talent (company internal technical trainings, but also public programs for entrepreneurial education), but it would serve to extend this effort towards public education (all levels), and also local accelerator and incubator programs for startup investments. We place our hope in the new cluster, in the ever more prevalent openness towards collaboration and social involvement of the local companies, and in the emergent few incubator/accelerators.

In the end I would like to talk about attitude and atmosphere. Both are essential, in Negruzzi’s opinion and I subscribe to it.

There are tensions in the current environment, generated by the over specialization in outsourcing and its implications, by the increasing competition on human resources and also by the disconnect between the official friendly diplomatic discourse of the involved parties and the lack of real collaboration project between the major market players. Even in the emerging startup scene, where open communication and mutual support are more present, we can feel an oscillation between healthy competition and plain vanity. Junimea’s recipe conditions the final satisfaction on the pleasure and joy in which the daily activities take place. I consider reordering our values the current top priority, and even if joyous and happy seem a bit farfetched as attributes of IT professionals, at the very least the pleasure and professional fulfillment should be our first concern.

Marius Mornea

marius.mornea@todaysoftmag.com Engineer intrested and involved in different IT activities, from development to, management, education to journalism as part of Epistemio, UTCN and TSM

www.todaysoftmag.com | no. 11/May, 2013

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communities

Cluj-Napoca IT communities

M

ay was full of major events and we are sorry that we couldn’t reach all but we are promissing to come back during next issues of TSM with interviews and feedback from them.

Calendar Transylvania Java User Group Java technologies community.

Website: http://www.transylvania-jug.org/ Started on: 15.05.2008 / Members: 539 / Events: 42 TSM community Community created around Today Software Magazine.

Website: http://www.todaysoftmag.ro Started on: 06.02.2012 / Members: 652 / Events: 9 Romanian Testing Community Testing dedicated community.

Website: http://www.romaniatesting.ro Started on: 10.05.2011 / Members: 607 / Events: 2

June 6 Launch of issue 12 of TSM magazine www.todaysoftmag.ro June 7 Project Managers Meetup www.facebook.com/events/519200844808524 June 12 Linked Data Technology Stack www.meetup.com/Cluj-Semantic-WEB June 12 Functional Programming Retreat it-events.ro/events/functional-programming-retreat

GeekMeet Cluj Community dedicated to web technologies.

Website: http://geekmeet.ro/ Started on: 10.06.2006 / Members: 547 / Events: 17

June 14 Development of a business it-events.ro/events/proiectarea-si-dezvoltarea-unui-e-business

Cluj.rb Ruby community.

Website: http://www.meetup.com/cluj-rb/ Started on: 25.08.2010 / Members: 134 / Events: 34

June 18 Business Analysis Community Group Meeting it-events.ro/events/business-analysis-community-groupmeeting/

The Cluj Napoca Agile Software Meetup Group Community dedicated to Agile development.

Website: http://www.agileworks.ro Started on: 04.10.2010 / Members: 324 / Events: 29

June 19-20 ITC Spring Europe, Luxemburg (recommended by TSM) www.ictspring.com

Cluj Semantic WEB Meetup Community dedicated to semantic technologies.

Website: http://www.meetup.com/Cluj-Semantic-WEB/ Started on: 08.05.2010 / Members: 140/ Events: 22 Romanian Association for Better Software Community dedicated to IT professionals with extensive experience in any technology.

Website: http://www.rabs.ro Started on: 10.02.2011 / Members: 223/ Events: 12

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no. 11/May, 2013 | www.todaysoftmag.com

Thursday/weekly OpenConnect www.facebook.com/groups/355893314491424/ Wednesday/bi-monthly OpenCoffee www.facebook.com/opencoffeecluj

programming

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

Software Craftsmanship

T

he Software Craftsmanship movement started in 2009, as a reaction to the idea that we can temporarily reduce the code quality to ship products faster. The promoters of the movement think exactly the opposite: to deliver products in time, even under pressure, we should improve the speed with which a programmer writes quality code. In the first case the users, customers and the company that produces software can suffer; users and customers due to the mistakes introduced in the applications (bugs), and the company due to medium term decrease of the production speed for new application versions and due to user dissatisfaction.

Alexandru Bolboaca

alex.bolboaca@mozaicworks.com Agile Coach and Trainer, with a focus on technical practices @Mozaic Works

To support the need of aspiring software craftsmen to reach this level, the promoters of the movement used a metaphor based on the history of guilds.

Metaphor

Adrian Bolboaca

adrian.bolboaca@mozaicworks.com Programmer. Organizational and Technical Trainer and Coach @Mozaic Works

During the medieval age all goods were hand made. Professions were structured in guilds, where the craftsmen would meet, learn from each other and defend their profession. Because certain guilds delivered very high quality products, their fame was increasing. This is why guilds were closed institutions; any craftsman that entered a guild needed to produce goods at a certain quality.

A blistering competition took place between the guilds from different cities; therefore, the quality of the products was constantly increasing. Every guild had bylaws that brought under regulation its internal mechanism. Also, laws regulated the way the guilds functioned.

To become a craftsman, a young man needed to pass several stages: he needed to become an apprentice, then a mate and a journeyman to learn from other craftsmen. Only afterwards he could become a craftsman himself. Ascending in a guild was very difficult and needed long years of preparation. A young man was starting his apprenticeship even when he was 10-12 years old. Before starting as an apprentice the young man needed to work as an intern

for 2-3 weeks so the craftsman would test his skills. The apprenticeship lasted around four years, during which the apprentice was a quasi-slave in his master’s home, having to do chores from sunrise until sunset.

After his apprenticeship was complete, the apprentice was given a certificate that allowed him to be hired as a mate. The mate had three options: stay in the master’s shop, get hired at another craftsman or do his journey. The journey was a way of learning; its purpose was to help the mate better master the craft. The minimum journey time was 2 to 4 years.

After the journey, the journeyman needed to pass a craftsman exam through a practical assessment, a craftsman work or a masterpiece. A committee of respected guild members analyzed the work and approved or rejected it. Only after a long process of admission, the young craftsman was allowed to open a workshop. A craftsman was a citizen of the city he lived in and could take part in the political decisions of the city.

Guilds elected their leadership team.

The craftsman with the biggest experience and with an immaculate reputation was usually the guild leader. The leaders took care that the guild would prosper, created the quality standards and did all the administrative papers.

www.todaysoftmag.com | no. 11/May, 2013

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programming Software Craftsmanship The principles

As said before, Software Craftsmanship is an approach from the S oftware Development industry that stresses the importance of developers’ skills. The initiators of the movement intend to raise the bar of the IT professionals by applying these concepts from the medieval age. The movement started in the year 2009 by creating a manifesto “Manifesto for Software

History

Starting from 2009 when this manifesto was published, more and more programmers started to self-proclaim “Aspiring Software Craftsman”, the equivalent of the apprentice from the history of guilds and craftsmen. Their purpose is to get to a point when programmers care about the quality of products, about the code quality and to want to learn conti-

Software Craftsmanship manifest

Craftsmanship”.

This manifesto is extending the “Manifesto for Agile S oftware Development”. The Agile Manifesto proposed four important values: functional software, fast response to change, value the interactions between people developing software and intensive collaboration with the customer. Software Craftsmanship extends the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” by saying that we do not want just functional software, but software created with care and skills. Not only answering fast and effective to change, but continuously adding value through functionalities important for the users. Not the interactions between people are important, but also building a community of professionals. Not only collaboration with customers, but also productive partnerships based on trust.

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nuously. Like an apprentice was working from sunrise to sundown, aspiring software craftsmen keep practicing to improve their skills. A few ways of learning were promoted: coding kata, coding dojo, pairprogramming, and a new concept was invented: code retreat. We will come back to each of them in detail.

Corey Haines is amongst the first programmers who decided to be a “software journeyman”. More than a year Corey traveled the world with the only purpose to learn new things from other programmers.

During his trip he wanted only to have a place to sleep and to have something to eat in exchange of working on any software.

After his journey finished, Corey came back to his master, Robert C. Martin, and told him what he learned, much like in the guilds time.

no. 11/May, 2013 | www.todaysoftmag.com

Programming practices

As opposed to other professions, a programmer does not have a set of standardized practices to learn. Teams use, of course, a set of practices, but at the industry level we lack proof about what helps and what does not help when developing complex applications.

This was a problem for Software Craftsmanship, because you cannot develop the skills of programmers when you do not know which skills help. The initiators of the movement have done two things: they have selected some of the practices from the experience of programmers who worked for decades in software development and insisted that each programmer should learn continuously inside the community, hoping they will succeed in defining the profession.

Some of these recommended practices for any aspiring craftsman are: automated testing as unit testing or test driven development, continuous refactoring, keeping the code clean through specific rules, elements of design and architecture, different programming paradigms – object oriented and functional –, and pair-programming.

This list is just a basis for the members of communities to start building upon.

At a personal level, the recommendation of the movement is that each programmer tries to master these practices, discuss them in the community and choose the one that help them the most for a certain project.

The movement is sometimes criticized because of this list of practices. A lot of the remarks are reactions to Robert C. Martin’s (probably the most vocal promoted of Software Craftsmanship) assertions, who tenaciously supports these practices. His purpose is to define a standard for the profession, but the methods used alienate some programmers interested in the movement. In reality most of the to aspiring software craftsmen are pragmatic developers that prefer to master the tools of the craft in order to deploy the useful ones when in need.

Ways to learn

Once a list of programming practices that need to be mastered is defined, the programmers need ways to learn them.

As the experience of Corey Haines (and not only) shows, one of the best ways to learn programming is by interacting with the community. But at the same time programmers should work to develop their abilities on their own.

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE Software craftsmanship is suggesting some methods to learn these practices.

Coding kata is a method borrowed from martial arts. It refers to exercising a programming practice by repeatedly solving a simple problem while using that practice.

Many kata problems are documented on the web, as well as video recordings of programmers who demonstrate solving them.

The most important thing is to reflect after each kata and figure out what slowed the process down and what should change to accelerate.

Coding dojo is another method borrowed from martial arts. It refers to a group exercise with the purpose of exchanging knowledge between attendees. The group will try to solve a problem using certain practices. In its most known way, two programmers write code on a projector so that everyone can see. At a time interval (around 7 minutes), one of them is replaced by the next programmers from the audience. In this way, through rotation, everyone writes code and sees how others write code.

Code retreat is another format, this time borrowed from the writers community. The idea of a code retreat is to combine more elements from a coding dojo or coding kata into one day of practice. Code retreats take place usually on Saturdays and last the whole day. The event is structured in 6 sessions of 45 minutes, divided by short retrospectives. The rules are simple: during each session the programmers work in pairs with the purpose to write code within certain constraints required by the facilitator, chosen so that the learning process is fast. The code is deleted completely after each session, the pairs and the constraints change and the code writing starts again.

The first code retreats took place in USA

in 2009, followed soon after by Romania, where Maria Diaconu and Alexandru Bolboacă facilitated them within the AgileWorks community. Corey Haines had a very important role in disseminating the event throughout the world, everything culminating with the “Global Day of Code Retreat”, when during 24 hours code retreats are happening round the clock in the whole world. Adrian Bolboacă is the responsible on Europa of this global event.

Shortly after these practices were taken by the testers community as well, and now there are testing kata and testing dojo. Also, lately Markus Gärtner facilitated the first test automation retreat.

The same, these practices were adapted for architecture learning, named architectural kata and architecture retreat.

New types of exercises appeared in time. Adrian Bolboacă invented the session named “Taking baby steps”, with the purpose of learning refactoring and was successful at international conferences, inside communities and at code retreats.

Adrian Bolboacă and Alexandru Bolboacă invented the session “Brutal refactoring” that was facilitated since in many places in the world. Keith Braithwaite invented the session named “TDD As If You Meant It”, now used at almost every code retreat.

Besides community events, learning by pair-programming is an excellent way to master the practices described above.

Any programmer should be able to invite another for a private practice session.

Several programmers do this remotely as well; Alexandru Bolboacă opened a couple of years ago a “Remote Pair-programming Tour” in this purpose.

Conferences

The Software Craftsmanship community organized several conferences. The most known are in USA and London, but Romania joins this year with I. T.A.K.E. Unconference. On 30-31 May, the event will gather programmers from Europe and a special guest from USA in order to discuss, practice and learn together these programming practices. Not only the speakers will write code, but the attendees will program during the workshops, the Kata Lounge contest, will develop an open source product during a hyper-agile format named “Open Space Software Development”, or during the unconference track organized with the “Open Space” format. The leaders of many European Software Craftsmanship communities will speak and facilitate workshops at this event. This event opens the gates of the highest level of knowledge about software development in Europe to all programmers in Romania.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Software Craftsmanship is a wide spread international movement, whose foundation is the idea that the programming profession means the ability to deliver quality code under pressure. To reach this level, the programmers must master a list of practices. To master them they can practice by themselves and inside communities through specific meeting formats.

The code retreat is the format that spread the fastest during the last years, climaxing with the Global Day of Code Retreat. In Romania, the movement is promoted by the agile community “AgileWorks”, by the “I T.A.K.E. Unconference”, and by passionate programmers from the country.

References http://arheologie.ulbsibiu.ro/publicatii/bibliotheca/bresle/4%20capitolul%20II.htm http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org http://agilemanifesto.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata_%28programming%29 http://codingdojo.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WhatIsCodingDojo http://coderetreat.org/about http://www.testingdojo.org/tiki-index.php http://blog.adrianbolboaca.ro/2013/04/the-history-of-brutal-refactoring-game/ http://blog.adrianbolboaca.ro/2013/01/the-history-of-taking-baby-steps/ http://www.alexbolboaca.ro/wordpress/articles/how-to-organize-a-code-retreat http://www.alexbolboaca.ro/wordpress/the-remote-pair-programming-tour http://agileworks.ro http://itakeunconf.com

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architecture

From The Software Architect’s Kitchen – Scenario Cards

T

he methodology presented in this article was developed at SEI (Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon) and is part of the ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method) methodology. The article presents this methodology in a simplified form and stresses its practical application.

The Scenario Card Attila Antal

Attila.Antal@isdc.eu Software Architect @ ISDC

Scenario Cards are used to argument decisions from various points of view. The cards are used by the architect of a certain project and distributed in order to be assessed by the team’s decision makers, including the client.

A template of the scenario card is presented in the diagram below. As seen above, the card has four sections: • The details section, where a relevant code of the scenario and a short description of it are introduced • The section containing details connected to the work environment from an architectural point of view • The section for the decisions that are going to be made in respect of the scenario • The section for architectural arguments, the reason and a simple diagram reflecting the scenario’s object.

• Sensitivity points marked with the code S1, S2, …

• Tradeoff points marked with the code cod T1, T2, …

• Risks marked with the code R1, R2, …

• Non-risks marked with the code N1, N2, …

A sensitivity point represents the particularity of a component which is critical for obtaining a quality attribute.

The tradeoff point is a particularity affecting several quality attributes or it is a sensitivity point for several attributes.

Risks are architectural decisions that can cause potential problems.

Non-risks represent the specification of good architectural decisions in the scenario card having an informational character.

These columns may contain one or The section for decisions has one field several values in codified form (already for explanation and other four for impact mentioned above). These codes are going on the current architecture. These are: to be explained in dedicated lists.

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TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE Case Study

DL2: Configurable Logic

In order for the operating procedure through which an appropriate solution is found using the scenario cards to be presented DL3: Logic based on Rule Engine as real as possible, I will further bring forward a hypothetical case.

Thus, a supposed client has an application in which he wants Scenario #: DL3 A Rule Engine will be used for decisions. to introduce in the business logic start a module that decides Attribute(s) Flexibility and influences the results of certain calculations. It will ask the Environment During operation (Runtime) project’s architect (in this case use) to come up with some impleRequest for a decision coming from Business Stimulus mentation ideas.

Logic.

The architect, meaning us, will carry out three scenarios and Response Decisions made by Rule Engine. get these through an assessment procedure and finally try to find Architectural Risk Nonrisk Sensitivity Tradeoff the most appropriate solution. decisions Let’s see the scenarios!

Using a Rule S2, S3

DL1: Hard-coded Logic Scenario #: DL1 Attribute(s) Environment Stimulus Response Architectural decisions Hardcodare Reasoning

An internal decision, hard-coded logic will be used.

Performance During operation (Runtime) Request for a decision coming from Business Logic.

Decisions made based on internal logic.

Sensitivity

Tradeoff

Risk

Nonrisk

Engine Maintenance of the rules base

T2

S4

R3

N2

The introduction of a Rule Engine into the architecture confers flexibility and configurability.

Reasoning

Architecture Diagram

S1 R1 N1 Using the “hard-coded” decision mode, the complexity level is reduced and also maximum execution performance can be achieved.

List of Sensitivity Points Code

Architecture Diagram

S1 S2 S3 S4

Scenario #: DL2 Attribute(s) Environment Stimulus Response Architectural decisions Hardcodare Fișier de Proprietăți Reasoning

Se va folosi o logică de decizie internă semihardcodată bazată pe anumite atribute configurabile prin intermediul unui fișier de proprietați.

Configurability În timpul rulării (Runtime) Cerere de luare decizii dinspre Business Logic.

Decizii luate pe baza logicii interne influențate din exterior.

Sensitivity Tradeoff

Risk R1

T1

Nonrisk N1

R2

Dacă logica de decizii se bazează pe niște parametri care se pot externaliza, atunci se poate introduce configurabilitate.

List of Tradeoff Points Code T1 T2

Description Trebuie decis dacă proprietătile vor fi recitite imediat după modificare sau numai după relansarea aplicației (flexibilate vs. garanția calculațiilor ptr. toți).

Trebuie ales un Rule Engine portivit.

List of Risks Code R1 R2

Description A change in logic requires development.

Since the properties file is a sensitivity point of the system, it must be protected and specific roles must be insured for the modification.

List of Non-Risks Code N1 N2

Architecture Diagram

Description The decision logic is difficult to modify afterwards and requires the product to be relaunched into production.

Introduces complexity to the project.

Requires expertise and/or experience.

In sync communication and planning with the team maintaining the rules base.

Description It is easy to achieve and insures the on-time launch into production.

A simple solution must be found for launching the rules.

Assessment

For the assessment of scenarios we will use the tabular form of a “Utility Tree”.

We enumerate the scenarios from the cards, but we can also www.todaysoftmag.com | no. 11/May, 2013

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architecture From The Software Architect’s Kitchen – Scenario Cards add others (without the card) and ask the parties participating on behalf of the client to grade these according to importance (L – low, M – medium, H - High). The difficulty column will be marked by the project architect. In our case, the table will look like this (the importance column being a speculation): Quality Attribute

Scenario

Importance Difficulty

Performance

DL1: Hard-coded logic

L

Configurability

DL2: Configurable logic

H

Flexibility

DL3: Logic based on Rule Engine

H

technical representative.

• Scenario Cards must be collected and catalogued, because these are part of the decision making process and also these can be reused.

L M H

The ones with major importance must be selected from the table above, namely: • DL2: Configurable logic (H, M) • DL3: Logic based on Rule Engine (H, H) Since scenario # DL3 presents also high difficulty, we require more analyses to be carried out by the parties and have to see whether they actually need this solution. The high level of difficulty can be translated in our case as: more expensive, longer implementation time and possible license and maintenance costs.

Therefore, we may state that until a decision is made in respect of # DL3, the winning solution is # DL2.

Summary

The conclusions we can draw after reading this article are: • The Architect must always come up with various scenarios for a single problem.

• The Scenario Card is a presentation medium for an idea and in the same time it is a decision making medium.

• The Scenario Card is the first line where the sensitivity points, tradeoff and risks are mentioned.

• Each card must be assessed by the client or by the client’s

Throughout the year, ISDC engineers dreams of customers.

Only in spring time, we engineer Easter sponge cakes!

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PAȘTE FERICIT! FIJNE PAASDAGEN! FROHE OSTERN! !

architecture

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

Sustainable architecture (grow from novice to guru)

T

he dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have, because when you’re talking about building a house, you’re talking about dreams. Robert A. M. Stern

THE PHILOSOPHY

Levente Veres

Levente.Veres@endava.com Design Lead @ endava

Nowadays, application development is not only about module development, software maintenance, which was created many years ago, or the simple functionality testing. The Romanian ‘softists’ have reached the level in which not only the client or „developer” wants more, but the market wants something more from ‘Romanian developers’. The customer expects something more precious than coordinated execution, something extra and unexpected, even for him. Of course, the vast majority of programmers neglect this detail which they become aware of when they are customers themselves.

The vast majority of developers will not be able to sacrifice time and additional energy to offer something extra. There are many reasons behind this choice: personal, financial or even stagnation in the comfort zone.

The article below is addressed to all those willing to offer something additional to standard requirements and also to prepare in becoming the best in IT. Of course, each has his own unique way to reach the Architect level, which requires years of experience.

To define an Architect, either in the system-software, solution or business category, I’d use a few keywords: dreams, reality, creation, timeless. An architect must take into consideration the fact that any solution or application he created actually reflects some people’s dream and will be a long-lasting creation. If you find the

above mentioned vocation, we can move on to the next level where we will briefly discuss some aspects of how to turn a dream into a reality.

THE SECRET

What is the key to an architecture which satisfies all the project requirements? The question is rhetorical, but it can be answered. The ideal architecture is one that meets the four criteria mentioned above and is consistent with the decisions taken during deployment, while not deviating from the basic criteria proposed in the early stages of architecture.

While it seems easy to handle the later stages, it is actually harder to keep the creation in balance, because of various reasons such as managerial or financial decisions, changing the purpose or team.

THE BUCKET LIST

To keep all under control, we have to be aware that without a ’to-do list’ we will not be able to be consistent, which will prevent the architecture from being sustainable.

This list only makes sense if we regularly resume and check whether what we originally defined is still valid. If the deviation is too high, it’s time to think if the selected architecture would be good enough.

A list of SMART necessities can be the following:

A. Data collection

1. Create a list of functional requirements.

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architecture Sustainable architecture (grow from novice to guru) Example: an application that can book plane tickets.

2. Create a list of non-functional requirements Note: : If you do not have something like this from the client, then ARCHITECT is responsible for making a list like the one shown below, which will help the developers.

Example: • Our solution finds all tickets available for a specific route in 30 milliseconds.

• Each database query lasts no more than 10 milliseconds.

• We serve 1,000 users per minute.

• We use each application server with an occupancy rate of maximum 70%.

3. Create your own list of possible requirements (define how extensible you want the application to be).

Example: in the near future we want to serve mobile applications through Web Services (Restful).

4. Create a list of expectations of stakeholders from the proposed solution Example: • Economic Manager: 10% reduction of sales costs • IT Manager: reduce employee dissatisfaction with access to the system • Employees: customers are able to quickly book tickets.

B. Shape it: ‘Our friend, the barber’

1. Slice – cut the right size • Break the problem down into smaller problems, major functionalities into sub functionalities that can be resolved.

• Another method is to decompose in modules / blocks that are closer to the OOP concept.

2. The orthogonal barber: • Let’s orient towards orthogonality, ie modularize the solution. This allows us to create different modules and interfaces facilitating testing and maintenance of the product.

3. DRY(Don’t Repeat Yourself) – Uscatul • The most well-known acronym related to the idea: a single result to a single problem. It’s important not to try to repeat the code, modules, interfaces that have the same functionality.

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4. Test it: the mirror test • solution testability is most vital in supporting a robust architecture, but still responsive to changes.

• It is important to decide to what extent we wish to test the proposed solution: the micro level that will test each variable, method or class or the macro-oriented testing, in which case we are interested in the modules that can be tested.

5. FixIt: - a skilled barber respects himself: • It’s good to create modules that support changes and fixes so you do not have an impact on other components.

• If the fix induces changes to several modules at the same time, it is necessary to review the initial plan, if the architecture really meets our needs.

6. Cost of changes: pay the barber • the robust architecture must support continuous change, but at the same time the price of those changes should be minimum.

• To calculate the cost of change we can use a simple equation that warns about the risks: Sum( Change[1..n]x Sum(Affected Module[1..m]) ) = Cost of Change

• • where n, m is the maximum number of changes and modules.

• Each module and change has the value of 1 and certainly if the modules are more complex we can define a specific cost for each of them.

• We will get the maximum cost if every change has an impact on each module.

• The ideal cost is 30% of the maximum, the optimal cost is between 30% and 70% and the critical cost is over 70% of the maximum cost.

Example: for 3 modules, where Modul3 has cost3, for 2 changes we have the following cost o Change1 x (Module 1 + Module 2) + Change2 x (Module1+Module2+Module3) = 1x(1+1) + 1x(1+1+3) =2 +5=7 o Cost maxim: Change1(Module1 + Module2 + Module 3) + Change2x(Module1+Module2+Module3)= 1x(1+1+3)+1(1+1+3)=10

o Maximum Cost : 10; Ideal Cost: 3; Critical Cost: 7.

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE In the above example we are at the boundary between the A lot can be added to the above list, in order to be very comcritical and ideal cost, which informs us that the archi- plex and satisfactory. However, benefits should be considered each tecture may be affected and have major consequences. time by introducing new complexities. In the next issue of TSM we will identify some ‘best practices’ to create architectures accessible C. Focus Point: to remember to the entire team.

• check quality, metrics, modules and classes redundancy; • check whether the chosen architecture and alignment standards (TOGAF, ISO, etc.) are also mapped on the current solution; • introduce checkpoints to validate the solution and architecture; • Recall the limits of hardware, network and integrated components; • Do remember that resources are limited (money, developers).

D. The Good is the Enemy of the Perfect: let’s tend to perfection • always try to improve the existent code.

• don’t succumb to your ideas: improvement is free, let’s leave for tomorrow what we can do today etc • Respect your work and others.

• Use the concept of „Benefits +1”, always bring something in addition to what you have been asked.

• PROTOTYPE: prototyping helps us to be sure that we are on the right track • DRAW: the graphical display of architecture brings the visual benefit of a rapid analysis

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QA

Testing in the Cloud

N

owadays everyone talks about the Cloud, how to move IT activities into Cloud, how to gain time and money using advantages offered by the Cloud. So, what exactly is this Cloud and who takes care of it so everything goes fine inside of it?

A short definition: “The cloud is a complex mechanism made from a suite of software and hardware services configured based on client needs.” Services offered by the Cloud are split into two main categories: SaaS and IaaS • SaaS – Software as a Ser vice: Rental of software licenses (subscription based). More exactly, SaaS is a method of supplying access to licenses through web.

Using this method the client will not need to install and run the application on his local environment which will lead in the end on getting the work done without having to do regular maintenance and support. E.g.: CMS, CRM, Email, Virtual Desktop, Communications, Games, etc .

• IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service: Rental of hardware resources (storage, memory, CPU). Like SaaS, once externalized, this service will provide a more relaxed environment so the focus can be put more on other activities. E.g.: Virtual Machines, Servers, Storage, Load Balancers, Network, etc.

Also there is some other services offered by the cloud PaaS and NaaS: • PaaS – Platform as a Service: Complete platform rental for development which include operating systems, data bases, web servers, etc.

• NaaS – Network as a Service: Network rental, connection services, VPN, optimization of the rented resources, etc Some of the advantages offered by the Cloud are the mobility, velocity, almost unlimited storage, processing power far superior, no worries regarding maintenance

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of hardware and software resources.

Other advantages, which are usually pursued by managers, would be to reduce the expenses with software licenses, adjusting the expenses based on the needs and transforming the costs of capital into operational costs.

Who offers these services? Usually big companies like HP, Keynote Systems, Advaltis, Compuware, Load Impact, SOASTA, etc. These providers may also be using hardware services rented or sold by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.

Testing in the Cloud

Testing is a challenge for many projects, especially for big applications where the business is complex and performance do suffer under heavy load conditions of usage. The quantity of test cases may vary from a few hundreds to thousands and all these need high capacity of processing and long times of execution. Not taking into account the human resources needed to cover all these needs.

The Cloud comes as a helping hand, offering the best approach to client needs.

Hardware virtualization, unlimited storage, software and hardware, all these will reduce the time execution.

Beside all these advantages, migrating into Cloud can be quite expensive and not always is the best solution to our testing problems. What should be then considered before moving our testing activities into Cloud?

Earth (geo location), (socializing website or video-streaming). Firewall and Load Balancer testing imply expenses on hardware/software and maintenance. For the applications where the user increase rate is unpredictable or where we get many environments for deployment, the Cloud shows its advantages over the more traditional “in house” environments.

B. Testing types that we need to run Most popular tests that are usually ported in Cloud and from which testing can benefit most: • Stress Testing • Load Testing • Performance Testing • Functional Testing • Compatibility Testing • Browser Performance Testing • Latency Testing Moving into Cloud with testing is usually done for performance testing, trying to simulate a traffic as real as possible and to distribute it in various locations. On these aspects, Cloud proven itself for adaptability and velocity for providing the final results more accurate.

Steps to be followed

So after we decided that we can move into Cloud, what are the steps to be followed?

First we need to identify the use-cases.

Then we extract the test-cases. Usually these two steps are made in the beginning A. Application characteristics of each sprint or project regardless if the The Cloud can help us when we need tests will be ran into Cloud. connections distributed all around the Third step is the one when we choose

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TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

the Cloud Service Provider. We do this accordingly with our application and the results we need to obtain. Also we need to take into account the services that our Provider is offering and to be sure that in the next period of time it will not change in a way to affect our testing.

Fourth and fifth steps are Setup Infrastructure and Leverage Cloud Servers.

These two steps are meant to identify necessary hardware for running the tests, calibration and optimization of the Cloud servers to correspond as much as possible with the production setup.

After all these steps we continue with

running our tests, monitoring intermediate testing environment has some costs. results and then extracting the results we Usually the cost is one of the criteria need. taken into account for the final decision; The flow looks simple at first sight from • Security may be a problem for some above figure but in order to do a successkind of applications where sensitive data ful migration there are a few more hints to is traded between DB, WS and so on; take into consideration. One would be to • Different results for same tests becaunderstand very well the platform where use of the often changing of performance we move our testing activities. Another on the environment where the Cloud hint is to identify which tests will be moved provider is; and how will they be run. Not all the tests worth moving.

Conclusions We see all around us companies who Advantages for moving into Cloud offer Cloud services, especially storage.

• Once moved into Cloud the costs There are also companies oriented toward will decrease. We more specialized services like Testing in our don’t need to worry case. Decision to move testing into Cloud anymore for maintai- it’s a technical decision but it’s also a mananing a private cloud; gement one from a financial perspective.

• Un limite d Short term advantages for a big project s t or a g e , a c c e s s i - will probably won’t be visible quickly, but as ble from anywhere time will go by these advantages will appear (using mobile devi- and the initial investment will be covered. ces and PC’s); So, do we move our testing in the • R u n n i n g Cloud? automated tests that were previously recorded, optimized References: and checked locally; http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com • Flexibility http://wikipedia.org on often changes on http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all. operating systems jsp?arnumber=5463680 and browsers; • High mobility for testing team where the team is distributed in multiple locations. This way, testing gains a big advantage because the time used to synchronize manua l ly b et we en t he teams decreases very much; • Almost no server maintenance;

Disadvantages for moving into Cloud

• Initial setup and adjusting configuration has higher costs. Also moving all tests into the new

Vlad Zeciu

vzeciu@smallfootprint.com Senior QA Engineer @ Small Footprint

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QA

Test Automation Orchestration

F

acebook, Google or Flickr have the possibility to introduce in production up to 10 new versions of product per day, in a way that is transparent to the users. In the heterogeneous and agile world of the IT industry, the development of applications and services becomes a challenge due to the diversity of technologies and products, as well as due to their number.

Lucian Revnic

lucian.revnic@hp.com OO Content Arhitect @ HP Software Cluj

Likewise, in the big software companies where there are Development, Testing and IT departments involved in the developing process there is the need of close collaboration. To insure efficiency, the collaboration is realized by standard processes and products which, because of the diversity of the processes and products used, becomes an objective that is difficult to attain.

The development methodology which stresses the collaboration between the Development, Testing and It teams is called DevOps. This methodology implies the specification of the teams, the processes and products used so that the production cycle of a version is as short as possible.

In the Romanian IT companies, which implement the DevOps methodology, they often use specific solutions, internally developed, such as scripts or different utilitarian devices. In the case of the projects developed as outsourcing, they depend on the processes and/or the products imposed by the needs and possibilities of the clients. The IT department and equipments are often situated in a remote data centre which is based on physical, virtual or cloud

servers.

The first problem is the collaboration between the involved departments. From this point of view the development team has, for example, a vision regarding quality that is different from the vision of the testing team, the testing team has a vision regarding the implementation and the IT team regarding the product developed and tested by the preceding teams. The teams need a common language for efficient communication.

The second problem is that of integration and standardization of the processes and products used when the projects, products or clients change. Since the initial solutions are specific to the existing projects, they have to be adapted to the new requirements. The cost necessary to the implementation of a new integration is significant and it is multiplied according to the number and nature of the new products used.

The present article presents an approach of these two problems based on a strategy of automatic testing. The solution named TAO is meant to be applied in the DevOps world and it represents an example, not an absolute solution. Furthermore, the examples and the technologies mentioned are from the Java world, and this option is justified by the author’s experience in this IT domain.

The Strategy

For the development of a reliable and quantifiable solution of automatic testing, we suggest the observation of three aspects: the testing environment, the testability of

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TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE the product and the continuous integration.

The Testing Environment

• Complexity – – the testing environment used varies from a physical server located in the proximity of the programmer or tester, to the complex data centers, based on virtualization or cloud technologies. The testing environment is often conditioned by the costs or by the availability of the clients over here and by the challenge regarding the generality of the automatic testing solution.

In the category of free products there are VMware Player, Oracle VirtualBox, Linux KVM. Among the commercial solutions of virtualization the most common are VMware vCenter, Citrix Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V. When it comes to cloud technologies, the leaders are Amazon EC2 and the OpenStack implementations (such as HP Cloud).

• Control – the solution of automatic testing must present basic capabilities of control of the testing environment.

It is necessary that the testing system allows the provision of the testing environment through generic actions: start, stop, configuration for as many testing environments as possible. For the applications which do not offer a silent module of installation, it is helpful that

Figura 2 Instalarea, configurarea și monitorizarea

Figure 3 Build server invoking automated tests

modified in the installation/ uninstallation process. This is important because in an automatic testing system, the installation/ uninstallation of different versions of the application are imperatively necessary. We recommend the usage of the silent way to install/ uninstall, but there are also alternative solutions that can be used, for example, the non-persistent storage devices mentioned above. The automatic testing system must allow the local or remote execution of scripts: Bash, PowerShell, Python, Perl etc. For remote connection it has to support protocols such as SSH, WMI etc.

• Configuration - the options of configuration of the application. After the installation of the application, the next step is its configuration in view of carrying out the automatic testing.

For the input of test data and the configuration of the application we often use options such as: the user interface, web protocols (REST, SOAP), files, data bases. The technologies often involved in

this phase are: Selenium, HP UFT (for the user interface), Soap-UI (SOAP), Spring, Apache Http Client (REST).

• Monitoring - means of observing the state of the application: the user interface, the data base, log files. The automatic testing systems must obtain the results of running the tests for validation and notify the involved teams about the results of running the tests.

The technologies used to carry out this task are usually the same with the ones mentioned in the sections above.

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration represents a practice of promoting a frequent integration of the source code into a central system of control of the versions, the frequent build of the application together with the running of unitary tests. This practice recommends the existence of an efficient build system, of a series of unitary tests, of a version control system and of a notification system.

• Build system – among the diversity

Figure 1 Testing environment provisioning

the testing environment allows the coming back to an initial state. This can be done through snapshots or non-persistent storage devices (such a feature is offered by the VMware vCenter).

The Testability of the Product

• Installation - the installation and uninstallation module. The applications often allow a silent way of installation.

One must identify parameters (files, registers, data bases etc.) that were

Figure 4 TAO generic architecture

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QA Test Automation Orchestration of systems I identified Jenkins, Hudson and CruiseControl as the most used in the DevOps world.

• Integration – – a complete process requires the integration between the build system, the unitary tests and the products used by the testing team (HP ALM/QC, Jira, Selenium, HP UFT) as well as the connection with the testing environment. The Jenkins/ Hudson communities offer extensions for the various integrations such as Jira, Selenium, HP UFT, HP ALM/QC, but there are also other solutions.

Considering all these mentioned aspects, a generic architecture of automatic testing is illustrated in Picture 4.

Our Solution

The product HP Operations Orchestration (OO) automates the IT processes by using flows and automation operations. The operations are atomic actions which perform specific tasks such as Remote Command Execution, SSH Command, SQL Query.

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The flows are sequences of logically interconnected steps, each forming an instance of an operation. The flows represent complex automation processes such as: Server Health Check, Provision Environment, Download and Install Application Build.

Today, the product offers a free library of more than 4000 operations and flows which cover integrations with technologies such as HTTP, LDAP, SSH, WMI, Ant, PowerShell, integrations with products such as HP ALM, Jira and with virtual and cloud systems such as VMware vCenter, Hyper-V, Amazon EC2.

The user has the possibility to use the flows and operations offered or to create new ones, by creating new flows. Studio is a visual environment of development which allows the creation of flows using structures and paradigms borrowed from the object oriented programming such as: data structures (lists, queues), control structures (if, case), reutilization and package.

The flows developed and tested in the Studio are published in a data base from where they are accessible by using a web

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component named Central. From here, the user can plan the running of the flows, so that they are carried out for example once per night, after each build.

Results

By using the OO product we achieved a series of automation flows grouped under the name of TAO (Test Automation Orchestration). The solution solves the problem of collaboration between the development, testing and IT teams, by a visual environment that is easy to use and understand by persons possessing some minimum experience in the programming languages.

The integration problem between the various technologies and products is solved by using the flows and operations offered by this product. Picture 5 represents some flows used by employing HP Operations Orchestration.

Similar Approaches

There are similar products which offer features similar to OO, among which we can mention: Electric Commander,

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

Figure. 5 HP Operations Orchestration

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator, UC4. Electric Commander represents, through the number of integrations and DevOps technologies used (build systems, applications server, testing products) a competitor for the OO product. They both provide a visual environment of flow development, planning options for their running, and reporting and monitoring systems. On the other hand, OO offers a set of flows much wider for the provision and integration with other products such as Jira, HP ALM/QC, Amazon EC, HP Server Automation etc.

The Future

References

Our next steps are the extension of TAO flows which are necessary in the various DevOps scripts, as well as the integration with code analyzing products (Sonar) and with open-source provision applications.

Our goal is to raise the awareness regarding the qualities of the HP Operations Orchestration product in general and of TAO solution in particular, by creating a public community which can facilitate and encourage the access to the already existing flows.

HP Operations Orchestration, Official Webpage, Hewlett-Packard, November 2012, H P O p e r at i on s O rc h e s t r at i on , Concepts Guide, Hewlett-Packard, June 2010, Electric Commander, Official Webpage, Electric Cloud, November 2012, Top 10 Virtualization Technology Companies Webpage, Keneth Hess, 2010, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia DevOps Webpage, November 2012.

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management

OPTIONSABILITY A discrete feature of IT projects

A

Bogdan Matei

bogdan.matei@3pillarglobal.com Senior Php Developer @ 3Pillar Global

n overview of the social and professional actuality reveals a rather exponential trend, especially in the last twenty years, which makes our today’s standards and benefits higher and higher. Beyond obvious evolution, the dynamics and magnitude of these events have led to take place an important, but yet subtle, change of emphasis positioning: the achievements do matter, but more than that, today, it matters most the further options you have. If there are other areas where this is less true, in IT this conclusion is real and representative.

Returning to IT projects, perhaps most, both customers and solution providers, would define a successful relationship when delivery of the product is done on time, on budget and meeting functionality and quality expectations. Most managers would consider the project ended well and would focus attention on a new challenge.

In reality, the period immediately following delivery is a critical point where opportunities arise for both the client (beneficiary of the software) and the supplier. The purpose of this article is to show why it’s important this moment, who is responsible and what it deserves to treated as a purpose itself, starting with the early stages of the project, when contract is signed.

Overall, the simplest generic way about conceiving and implementing a software project gathers together, as functional team, three main parts, unified by a purpose: Looking more in depth at successful

projects, it appears that beyond the differences in technology, methodology and process, their success is due to a property that, in the absence of a name, I called it „optionsability”. It is defined as the property of having and providing options. The functional relationship between the above parties changes a bit and tries to anticipate the future ways of the project: In real life, meeting customer inde-

cision is actually quite common, but thankfully the technical and management components know precisely their roles. If for the project’s goal all parties are consistently caring, for „optionsability” the responsibility returns to: .... developers and architects (the technical team). I would like to underline especially the role of developers, because a plan may have a correct implementation, but rigid, and they are the ones who make this decision, voluntarily or

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programare imperceptible. Thus „optionsability” becomes an important property that builds up continuously during the project development and it will influence later decisions.

It would be ideal that client comes with some outline directions, but in practice this rarely happens and this makes the role of the technical team even more important. And managers have an important role through continuous attention to maintain the project in time, budget and required functionality.

We defined the property, we presented its lifetime, we found the responsible, but why is it important and for whom?

To respond to „why?” is enough to take a short look at products enjoying success today: SUVs, smartphones, smart TVs, modern furniture (like Ikea), sports goods, tools, DIY tools, etc.. and even IT trends (Facebook, WhatsApp, iTunes etc).

The appearance of a product (design) and quality of materials (or implementation) usually qualifies a product for consumer’s attraction and/or affection (he becomes interested in it), but those that mark the product’s success are the options the product offers. Sometimes the offered options manage by themselves to decide on success. Most of us have or will have children.

After I made more unsuccessful toys shopping, I noticed that even at an early age, the choices are naturally influenced by offered options. I think it’s pointless to detail what options have Spiderman, Batman, Ironman, the heroes of Star Wars and Transformers ...

Regarding the answer to the question „for whom?”, the answer is simple, but yet surprising: for all.

For the customer involved in the

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE business community, the options are more important than the achievements themselves, particularly in times of crisis, when the possibilities decrease. An argument in this regard is the evolution of Apple shares in the past year, although the company reported record profitability.

Having options became an advantage more important than having achievements. For the business itself the options are a reservoir of safety, a border of flexibility and for the business owner they mean comfort providing a feeling of trust and freedom.

In themselves, these details may seem insignificant things, but they are the basic foundation that produces consequences in important decisions.

By extending the focus beyond the scope of the project, towards possible worthy options, in the short term this may mean an increase in costs, due to higher required skills and, maybe, necessary mindset changes. The mentality to think of options does not mean to immediately implement them! Instead it must make you aware of their possible later existence and they might need the ground prepared even from the initial design or development phase. Selecting between options only those beneficial comes from constant communication between the parties and a thorough knowledge. But on long term (over 1 year), the earnings are obvious: • increased efficiency, by reducing the time spent on „reinventing the wheel”; • a valuable knowledge base and more reliable tools, available to be (re)used; • decreased reasons for rewriting projects (client’s biggest nightmare); • a solid foundation for faster „best practice” achievements;

• less development time, helped by making more adaptations and integration of reusable code; • faster integration of newcomers or juniors; • more accurate estimations.

Another important benefit is the increasing appreciation of clients who come to consult with you, start recommending you and trust more in the business relationship held together. In time, the results of thinking with „optionsability” translate into the company’s reputation.

For the technical team are also considerable advantages: the level of professionalism increases, writing code becomes more challenging. It requires greater involvement in business context.

Developers must put themselves in client’s or client’s customers place and seek solutions and possibilities. Making a more flexible architecture or writing more readable, reusable and reliable code, is more exciting and more useful. Once the code is written, in time, a helpful foundation is building up, providing more confidence, reducing the stress brought by „unknowns” and making estimates a smaller problem.

Juniors also have a better model than the classic „trial and error”.

For the marketing team, the options are the best quality material. Take for example the most popular products: Coca-Cola, BMW, Audi, Starbucks, etc..

Almost anyone does not promote the products themselves, but instead options or emotions/benefits possible with product’s options. Options help marketers to conceive attractive and effective advertisements by focusing messages on the options

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management OPTIONSABILITY - A discrete feature of IT projects that people value most, but beware, always place of the users of that product. They offered by the product. must constantly seek and anticipate possible or beneficial developments, shaping For the end consumer to have choi- up their ideas into clear and manageaces is a rhetorical justification. The more ble implementations that provide easy educated they are, the more people rea- use of maintainability features (read, use, lize the importance of having options, in inspection, monitoring, re-use, adaptation, the expense of concrete assets (properties, extension, (de) activation). Technically, it money etc..). Options are seen as a solu- comes consistent help from data structures, tion or hope for efficiency, performance or algorithms, „design patterns”, methodoentertainment. logies and processes. „Agile” has a great Up to this point we probably we cleared contribution. the attributes of this property, but what is The best, shortest and most concrete more important is how this goes into prac- generic suggestion that I can give about tice. Like any mindset change I don’ t think how to start put this in practice is by to it is realistic to expect an immediate and noticing the reactions of the parties involgeneral adherence. This mentality requi- ved in that business area when the solution res more creativity and passion (or higher is presented. A good solution is usually responsibility). As the main responsible easier understandable. The code is the are technicians, their adherence to this way mirror of ideological expressions, relative of thinking is crucial. They should have a to a requirement or a natural feature. As a good knowledge of project scope and also, metaphor, reading a portion of code can at least, a basic understanding of project’s be seen as making a reportage about a landomain and should capitalize their tech- dscape. Usually landscapes have a cohesive nical skills from seeing themselves in the structure and should have the code.

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Making projects with „optionsability” as the second goal is not applicable to all projects! There isn’t a predetermined recipe. It depends very much on context, on result brought by an objective analysis of the gains and costs. From experience, it is well suited to long life projects with frequent maintenance needs or for projects seen as foundation for other projects. The decisions concerning the „optionsability” are taken step by step, always argued. The confirmation that the path is correct comes from increased stability of the quality of the project, from higher availability to meet changes and from better awareness about the implications.

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TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

Developing safety-critical software with SCADE

T

Hunor Csomortani

csmortani.hunor@evoline.ro Software Developer @ evoline

he requirements imposed by the standards in the field make developing safetycritical software be a continuous challenge for everyone involved in the process.

The SCADE development environment prescribes many of these rules right from the beginning of the project. Built on top of a synchronous language, having a deterministic approach, bundled with a certified C code generator and a set of tools to help with testing and verifying the product, SCADE lets us focus on implementing the high level requirements and saves us from worrying about the basic mistakes.

This article aims to make a short introduction of the tool, highlighting the advantages, disadvantages and challenges the developers using the tool have to face

The SCADE development environment

SCADE is built upon the Scade language, a synchronous language designed for developing real-time systems. The extension SCADE offers is a graphical development environment which helps modelling our software very similar to designing integrated circuits.

Developing with SCADE means creating operators, which have their functionality defined on diagrams, using a set of predefined operators. Diagrams can be of two types, data- or control flow (using finite state machines) or a combination of these two. Connecting these operators, the model of a real-time application is created, meant to be executed cyclically, reading its inputs at the beginning of each cycle and calculating its outputs based on these inputs and the internal states of the system.

The data types at hand are the basic ones (int, real, char, bool). It is possible to

define composed types, like arrays, enumerations and structures, or to import types defined in C or C++. Imported operators, which have their functionality implemented in other languages, can also be integrated in the model.

A synchronous model means that the computation of the outputs is not tied to the order in which these are made, outputs having a single possible value in a cycle. This approach allows omitting time inside the cycles – a useful abstract when developing real-time systems, as it leads to a finite execution time of the software which obeys the limitations of its operating environments.

SCADE forces these theoretical constraints during modelling, but also by a checker which validates the entire model.

This check assures the correctness of the design from all aspects, playing a similar role as a compiler.

In order to verify the model the simulator can be used to examine the model during execution. By setting the input interfaces the inner states of the model can be verified to the smallest detail: values of

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programming Developing safety-critical software with SCADE variables, data flows between and within the operators, transitions and states of the finite state machines.

Example

/* Playground::RisingEdge */ void RisingEdge_Playground( inC_RisingEdge_Playground *inC, outC_RisingEdge_Playground *outC) { kcg_bool tmp;

Let us model as an example an application which controls a if (kcg_cond(outC->init)) { locking system. As input we will receive the state of a button. For outC->init = kcg_false; output the command to close or open has to be computed. tmp = kcg_not(inC->btnPressed); } Our first operator will transform the state of the button to a else { rising edge event, which will take place only when the state of tmp = kcg_not(outC->rem_btnPressed); } the button changes from not pushed to pushed. The functionality outC->isRising = kcg_and(tmp, inC->btnPressed); could be modelled in the following way: outC->rem_btnPressed = inC->btnPressed; The second operator models the states of the system (closed or } opened) and the possible transitions between these states, using a finite state machine. The activation condition for the transitions is Advantages Using SCADE in the development process can assure a higher level of quality of the software throughout the whole process, without using any other tool. The theoretical guards of the synchronous approach applied from the very beginning, ensures that the product will meet the requirements for safety-critical software: the system will always have a well defined state and will react in the true value of the command variable. time constraints which are easy to define and measure. In the same Finally the data flows of the two operators can be connected, time the diagrams are self explanatory enough to become a good creating thus the model of the application. way of communication between the members of the project.

C code generation

We can transform our models in compliable C code with the help of KCG. The code generated

is certified to be free of low level programming errors. As the precondition for a successful code generation is to have a valid model, the generated C code keeps the theoretical qualities of its source: it is synchronous and deterministic.

Integration is achieved by calling the generated C functions. By creating a wrapper class for these functions as an interface between the generated code and the rest of the software, a single point of dependency for the rest of the application from the generated code can be achieved.

This approach makes the generated C files temporary artefacts during the build process of the application, the SCADE model being treated as source code.

KCG is certified to generate code conforming to multiple security standards in the industry: DO-178B (for aerospace and defence), EN 50128 (for rail transportation), IEC 61508 (industrial and energy) etc. This eases the certification process of the software developed with SCADE. The RisingEdge operator from the previous example will generate the following C function:

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TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE Disadvantages

The strong points of SCADE become the weak ones: the graphical approach requires more attention when developing in a team. Whereas for textual elements there are mature tools which are helpful in merging the work done by different developers, for diagrams this is still a challenge to be met, in most cases still impossible to achieve and a situation better to be avoided.

The constraints of the language raise the level of dependency between the model files: interfaces between operators need to match exactly in order to have a valid model. This requires closer collaboration between team members.

SCADE has limited ways to handle large and complex data structures. It is also not suitable for developing software which will require intensive computation.

Breaking these rules is impossible, even when this would be desirable.

Conclusion

Based on a synchronous language, SCADE guards the most important aspects in real-time software development – to have finite execution time and well defined states under any condition – so that these need to be considered throughout the developing process. The certified code generator helps in transforming the models into C code and integrating with the rest of the system. With all its disadvantages, SCADE suite is a mature solution for developing safety-critical software.

Challenges

Getting used to the synchronous approach is the biggest challenge developers will face. Constraints which in case of other languages must be imposed by separate tools or a dedicated architecture, in SCADE are at the core of the language and part of the development environment.

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programming

Big data and Hadoop

W

e all heard about trends. We have trends in music, fashion and of course in IT. For 2013 there were announced some trends that are already part of our lives. Who didn’t hear about cloud, machine to machine (M2M) or NoSQL. All these trends have entered in our lives as part of our ordinary day. Big Data is a trend that existed last year and it remained one of the strongest one.

Radu Vunvulea

Radu.Vunvulea@iquestgroup.com Senior Software Engineer @iQuest

In the next part of this article I would like to talk about Hadoop. Why? Big Data doesn’t exist without Hadoop. Big Data could be an amount of bytes that the client wouldn’t even know how to process them.

Clients started a long time ago to ask for a scalable way of processing data. On ordinary systems, processing 50T would be a problem. Computer systems for indexing and processing this amount of data are extremely costly, not just financial but also in terms of time.

At this point Hadoop is one (maybe the best) of the best processing solution for a

big amount of data. First of all let’s see how it appeared and how did it ended in being a system that can run on a 40.000 distribute instances without a problem.

A little bit of history

Several years ago (2003-2004), Google published an article about the way it handles the huge amount of data. It explained what solution uses to process and store large amounts of data. As the number of

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sites available on the internet was growing so fast, Apache Software Foundation starts creating Apache Hadoop based on the Google article. We could say that the article has become the standard for storing, processing and analyzing data.

Two important features for which Hadoop is currently a system that many companies adopt it for processing Big Data are scalability and the unique way in which data is processed and stored. About these features we will talk a little later in the article.

During the entire development process, Hadoop system has been and will remain an open source project. At the beginning it was supported by Yahoo which needed an indexing system for their search engine. Because this system was working so well it ended also to be used by Yahoo for publicity.

A very interesting thing is that Hadoop system didn’t appeared overnight and at the beginning it wasn’t as robust as it is today.

At the beginning there was a scalability problem when it had to scale up to 10-20 nodes. The same problem was with the performance. Companies as Yahoo, IBM, Cloudera, Hortonworks saw the value that

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TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

multiple writers on the same file. In fact HDFS is a storage that allows to have only one writer and multiple readers. It is designed this way because of the type of data it contains. These data doesn’t change very often and that’s way it doesn’t need modifications. For example the logs of an application will not change and the same thing happens with the data obtained from an audit. Very often data that is stored after processing they end in being erased or never changed.

3. Portability Before talking about the architecture of the system and how it works I would like to talk about another property that the system has – portability. For this reason HDFS is not used just together with Hadoop system but also as a storage system. I think this property helped HDFS to be widespread.

From the software point of view, it is written in Java and can run on any system.

Figure 1: Hadoop ecosystem

Hadoop system was bringing and they invested in it. Each of this system had a similar system which tried to resolve the same problems. At this moment it became a robust system that can be successfully used.

Companies as Yahoo, Facebook, IBM, ebay, Twitter, Amazon use it without a problem.

Since in Hadoop data can be stored very simple and the processed information occupy very little space, any legacy system or big system can store data for a long time very easily and with minimum costs.

therefore any hardware problem that can occur is not seen as an error but as an exception of the normal flow. HDFS is a system that knows that not all the registered components will work. As a system that is aware of this it is always ready to detect any problem that might come and start the recovery procedure.

Each component of the system stores a part of the files and each stored bit can be replicated in one or more locations. HDFS is seen as a system that can be used to store files which have several gigabytes and can Data storage – HDFS reach to several terabytes. The system is The way Hadoop is built is very inte- prepared to distribute a file on one or more resting. Each part is thought for something instances. big starting with files storage to processing and scalability. One of the most important 2. Data access and interesting component that Hadoop Normal file system storages have as a has is the files storage system - Hadoop main purpose the data storage and they Distributed File System (HDFS). send us the data we need for processing.

Generally when we talk about storage HDFS is totally different. Because they systems with high capacity our thought work with large amounts of data they solve leads us to custom hardware which is this problem in a very innovative way. Any extremely costly (price and maintenance). system we will use, we will have problems HDFS is a system which doesn’t need spe- in the moment we will want to transfer cial hardware. It runs smoothly on normal large amount of data for processing. HDFS configurations and can be used together allows us to send the processing logic on with our home or office computers. the components where we keep the data.

Through this mechanism the data needed 1. Sub-system management for processing will not be transferred and Maybe one of the most important only the final result must be passed on properties of this system is the way that (only when needed). each hardware problem is seen. From the In such a system you would expect to beginning this system it was designed have a highly complex versioning mechato run on tens, hundreds of instances, nism. A system that would allow to have

4. NameNode and DataNode If we talk about the architecture of such a system is necessary to introduce two terms in our vocabulary: NameNode and DataNode. It is a master-slave system.

NameNode is „the master” of the storage system. This is handling the storage system of file name and knows where it can find it – mapping files. This system doesn’t stores the file data; he is just dealing with the mapping of the files, knowing in every moment the location where these files are stored. Once the name has been resolve by NameNode it will redirect the clients to the DataNode.

DataNode is „the slave” that stores the actual content of the files. Customers will access the DataNode to access the stored information- reading and writing of the data.

As a system that is ready for the fall of a component, in addition to NameNode, we have a SecondaryNameNode. This component automatically makes NameNode checkpoints and if something happens to the NameNode this component is ready to provide the checkpoint in order to restore the state that the NameNode had it before the fall. Note that SecondaryNameNode will never take the position that the NameNode has. It will not solve the location where the files are stored. The only purpose it’s to create checkpoints for NameNode.

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programming Big data and Hadoop 5. Data storage All data that is stored as files. For the client the file is not divided into several parts even if this happens internally. Internally the file is divided into blocks that will end in being stored on one or more DataNodes.

A large file can be stored in 2, 3 or even 20 nodes. The NameSpace controls this and it may require the blocks to be replicated in several locations. In Figure 1 is the architecture of the system.

What is interesting about this architecture is how it works with files. The accessed data by the customers never passes through the NameNode. Therefore even if we have only one NameNode in the whole system once resolved the location of the files no client request will need to go through the NameNode.

6. File structure How the files are stored to be accessed by customers is very simple. The customer can define a structure of directories and files. All these data are stored by the NameNode. This is the only one who knows how folders and files are defined by the customer. Options such as a hard-link or soft-link are not supported by HDFS.

7. Replication Because the stored data is very important, HDFS allows us to set the number of copies that we want to have for each file.

This can be set when creating the file or anytime thereafter. NameNode is the one that knows the number of copies that must exist for each file and makes sure that it exists.

For example, when increasing the number of replications that we want to have for a NameNode file take care that all blocks to be replicated again. NameNode’s job it doesn’t end here. For each block it receives

an “I’m alive” signal at a specific timeheartbeat. If one of these blocks does not receive the signal the NameNode will start the recovery procedure automatically.

How the data replicates is extremely complex. HDFS must take into account many factors. When we need to make a new copy we must be careful since this operation consumes bandwidth. For these reasons we have a load-balancer that handles data distribution in cluster, the cluster location where the data is copied to be able to do the load-balance in the best way possible. There are many options for replication; one of the most common is the 30% of responses to be on the same node.

In terms of distribution of the replications on racks, 2/3 are on the same rack and the other is on a separate rack.

Data from a DataNode may automatically be moved to another DataNode if it detects that the data is not evenly distributed.

All copies that exist for a file are used.

Depending on the location where you want to retrieve the data, the client will have access the closest copy. Therefore, HDFS is a system that knows how the internal network looks like- including every DataNode, rack and other systems.

8. Namespace The namespace that the NameNode has it stored in the RAM can be easily accessed.

It is copied to the hard disk at precisely defined intervals- the image name that is written on the disk is FsImage. Because the copy on the disk is not the same as in the RAM memory, there is a file in which all changes that are made to the file or folder structure are logged- EditLog. This way if something happens to RAM memory or the NameNode, the recovery is simple and can contain the latest changes.

Figure 2

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9. Data manipulation A very interesting thing is how the client can create a file. Initially, data is not stored directly in the DataNode, but in a temporary location. Only when there is enough data for a write operation worthwhile, the NameNode is notified and copies the data in the DataNode.

When a client wants to delete a file it is not physically deleting from the system.

The file is only marked for deletion and moved in the trash directory. In the trash is kept only the latest copy of the file and the client can enter into the folder to retrieve it.

All files in the trash folder are automatically deleted after a certain period of time.

Conclusion

In this article we saw how Hadoop appeared, which are its main properties and how the data is stored. We saw that HDFS is a system created to work with large amount of data. This is made extremely well and with minimal costs.

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TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

Functional Programming in Haskell

A

lan Perlis once said A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. Judging by the number of Stack Overflow questions and the impressive number of articles and posts on reddit, Slashdot or blogs, it is clear that the Haskell language deserves to be known. In fact, functional programming is indeed a domain which every hacker should be accustomed with.

History made it so that the commonest programming languages of today are in the imperative camp. There, the code is nothing more than a set of orders given to the computer. However, very few programmers know that the imperative programming paradigm is but one of the fourth invented by the mathematicians which laid out the bases of Computer Science. Hardly alike, these paradigms are linked together by one thing: the Church-Turing thesis which says that no paradigm can be used to solve more problems than the other ones. However, code can be written more easily in the functional paradigm than in the imperative one for some problems. In today’s languages landscape one sees an astonishing fact: even if all four paradigms were created roughly at the same time, the fact that the von Neumann computer model is so successful has made the imperative languages be the predominant ones in the field. Still, the other ones have their uses too, especially in Artificial Intelligence. The oldest programming language still in use today – LISP – was created by John McCarthy for Artificial Intelligence studies.

An important moment in the history of programming languages is represented by the influential article of John Bachus Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and its Algebra of Programs. An important point is made there: functional programs can be more easily composed by assembling previously tested components. Basically, this article is the catalyst for the apparition of new functional programming languages beside LISP. In 1970s there were no less than 10 new languages. From them, the ML family languages stand aside, being represented by two languages: OCaml which is

still in use today and Miranda.

It was from these languages where members of the 1990 committee for inventing a new language started their work.

They wanted an open standard capable of allowing and encouraging research in programming languages design and compilers.

In the end, they have created Haskell.

In time, this language managed to become a powerful programming language. Now, it is used in various domains, for example in Artificial Intelligence, Security, Web Development and Operating Systems. Many of the novelties which were created for this language later found their way into C++, Java, etc.

This development couldn’t be possible without the community which exists around the language (the #haskell IRC channel on Freenode, special groups and tags on Reddit and Stack Overflow, many blog articles collected weekly by Haskell Weekly News and twice a year by Haskell Communities and Activities Report) but it is also due to the great number of online resources for language learning (The Monad Reader, wikis and wikibooks, etc.).

Famous names from IT industry are using Haskell today, either in development or on local, small-scale projects: NASA, Galois, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Jane Street, etc. The first Perl6 interpreter was written entirely in Haskell. Tools for automatic program validation and theorem proving are developed in this language (sometimes with some Ocaml parts).

But why is this language so attractive?

The common answer has two aspects: the declarative style and a certain guarantee of code correctness. Functional programs are extremely concise; the focus is on what the code should do instead of how it should do

it. For example, here follows a quick-sort listing (always choosing as pivot the first element from the list): sort [] = [] sort (x:xs) = lesser ++ x:greater where lesser = sort [a | a <- xs, a < x] greater = sort [a | a <- xs, a >= x]

Compare this code with the lengthy implementation of the same algorithm in your favorite language. Clearly, functional code benefits from the declarative aspect: code is more easily read, unknown syntax elements can be skipped over, their meaning understood from the context.

To help prove code validation Haskell has static typing: each expression has a type which is known from the compile time.

There is no explicit conversion between similar types: the programmer is in charge with doing them where and when they are needed. Some researchers have promoted the idea that a good type system usage can lead to guaranteeing an important invariant: if the code compiles there’s a high chance that it is also correct. Quite often, this is true. In fact, what is recommended is to transform the most frequent runtime errors into compile time error. As an example, let’s look at the null-pointer-exception problem: a special type called Maybe is used in Haskell: the programmer will return values encapsulated into this container from functions which can fail and the compiler will ensure that every caller will test whether the call succeeded or failed.

At an extremity, there are web frameworks where every string is of a different type: one can no longer confound CSS with HTML and SQL injection and similar attacks are no longer possible.

Another advantage of static

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programming Functional Programming in Haskell typing is the fact that functions are searchable by knowing only their type. There are even two search engines for that: Hayoo and Hoogle. Both are able to generalize as much as possible the arguments and both are capable of offering good and eloquent suggestions. After a time, it is possible to arrive at a puzzle-solving like programming: the pieces are the functions which will remain into the end program.

An important characteristic of the language is its purity. Every program must interact with the outside world (reading data, sending data, etc.) Haskell is no different. However, his functions for this are marked differently from the type’s point of view. Any function with lateral effects is marked IO. And, if a programmer could extract the values from Maybe, this is no longer true for IO. This enforces that every function with lateral effects is only called from functions marked as having lateral effects. In practice, the code is divided into two parts: the purely functional code for data manipulation and imperative code for interacting with the outside world. It is this segregation which prompted Simon Peyton Jones – one of the language’s founders – to consider Haskell as being the best imperative programming language.

This segregation also helps in code parallelization. It is very easily to do this in Haskell: since pure functions have no lateral effects they can be called in every order, as many times as possible and their results can be memorized in caches. It is too easy to write lock-less code.

Another advantage of the language is its laziness. The programmer is able to write a code which works with infinite structures as long as they have a finite representation and only a finite number of elements is needed. Think of the infinite sequences from Math: they can be represented by a recurrence relation and you are only interested in the first few terms and some specific properties.

However, even if laziness allows us to write circular programs and work using infinite sequences, sometimes this harms in analyzing program’s performance. Luckily, Haskell has constructs for controlling evaluation type. Thus it is possible to enforce strictness and eagerness at function level.

On the other side, lazy evaluation ensures that only the needed data is computed, loosing as few clock cycles as possible.

Finally, by using all of the language’s features it is possible to write code with near C performance. The advantage of using a functional language becomes more

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evident now: a declarative code can be read even after 2-3 months have passed since it was first written.

Haskell code can be either interpreted or compiled. Using the GHC (The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compiler Collection) suite together with Haskell Platform is recommended. Thus, all of the language’s features and some higher level libraries which are consistently checked and performance improved are available. The GHC suite comes with a compiler (ghc) and an interpreter (ghci). The later enables rapid prototyping of applications, code testing and type evaluation. The compilers is used to generate an executable with the same performance as classical languages. Finally, there are tools in the Haskell Platform suite for profiling and optimizing the code.

Considering that enough details were presented and that the passion to learn the language is ignited it is time to go to some syntax elements. In the end, we will write a simple code for a simple problem: find the order of a permutation. For example, the order of (3 4 2 1 5) is 4: starting from (1 2 3 4 5) we get to (3 4 2 1 5), then (2 1 4 3 5), (4 3 1 2 5) and back to (1 2 3 4 5).

A permutation will be represented by using a list of numbers from 1 to n. In Haskell, [1, 2, 3] is the list of the first 3 natural numbers. To have a generic code, we can use a generator, like in [ 1 .. n]. A Haskell list allows only prepending elements by using the : operator. The empty list is []. List elements must all have the same type and can be accessed via !! operator..

Most of the functional programming functions are recursive. This enables using structural induction to prove code correctness. For example, the following function computes the length of a list: length [] = 0 length (x:xs) = 1 + length xs

The first line declares that length of any empty list is 0. The second says that the length of a list formed by prepending an element to a list xs is 1 greater than the length of the list xs.

Programmers accustomed with compiler structures and low-level programming will say that recursivity eats stack space and must be avoided.

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However, GHC compiler can do some code transformation arriving at tail recursion: each recursive call replaces the stack frame of the previous call such that the result is given back directly to the caller.

If you look closely at the 2 lines of length, you’ll see that there is exactly one line per each constructor. Almost all functions in functional programming use the same pattern of deconstructing the data type: write an expression for each constructor of the type.

Consider now the following two functions. The first one computes the sum of a list while the second the product of its elements. sum [] = 0 sum (x:xs) = x + sum xs product [] = 1 product (x:xs) = x * product xs

As you see, there’s a common pattern: starting from an initial element to be used for the empty list and a binary operation we get to a single result by “folding” the list.

This pattern is captured by Haskell via two functions (depending on the direction of the reduction): foldr f e [] = e foldr f e (x:xs) = f x (foldr f e xs) foldl f e [] = e foldl f e (x:xs) = foldl f (f e x) xs

Observe that one of the 2 functions is tail-recursive from the beginning: one of the call arguments is updated with the partial result. The difference between the two functions is observable from the following image: Other two important patterns are map and filer, illustrated by the following code and images: map f [] = [] map f (x:xs) = f x : map f xs filter p [] = [] filter p (x:xs) | p x = x : filter p xs | otherwise = filter p xs

Using these patterns enable us to write less code (remember DRY principle) which is also easy to prove for correctness. Finally, the compiler can further optimize our code if using said functions.

Now, let’s write code to apply a permutation on a list: for each element from the permutation we give back the corresponding element from the list (using !! to get the elements and map to apply this operation on all elements). applyPerm :: [Int] -> [Int] -> [Int] applyPerm l p = map (\i -> l !! (i - 1)) p

With this function we can compute the answer of our problem using until. This is the equivalent of imperative while: having

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE a predicate and a function for iterating between states it starts from an initial state and returns the state where the predicate becomes True. computeOrder :: [Int] -> Int computeOrder perm = fst $ until test f $ f init where l = length perm - 1 test p = snd p == [1 .. l] f (a, list) = (a+1, applyPerm list perm) init = (0, [1 .. l])

How does it work? Starting from a per-

function and collect all values, generating the list [x, f x, f (f x), ...]. Finally, we use take to select only the first elements of the list, taking advantage of laziness to get only the needed elements: *Main> take 5 $ iterate (flip applyPerm [3, 4, 2, 1, 5]) [1..5] [[1,2,3,4,5],[3,4,2,1,5],[2,1,4,3,5],[4,3,1,2, 5],[1,2,3,4,5]]

Next time weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll get into more elements of Haskellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s syntax: how to define new types and how to use them.

mutation, we use applyPerm to modify the current state from until. A state has two values: a counter and a list, the result of permuting the first natural numbers.

Using ghci, we test the code: *Main> computeOrder [3,4,2,1,5] 4

The result is the expected 4. We can test this by using iterate to infinitely call a

Mihai Maruseac

mihai.maruseac@gmail.com IxNovation @ IXIA member of ROSEdu, ARIA

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programming

Book review: RESTful Web Services Cookbook

by Subbu Allamaraju

T

he book which I submit for review this edition of TSM, entitled „RESTful Web Services Cookbook” by Subbu Allamaraju, Yahoo architect, is part of a special category. This book presents a complete guide to writing and consuming REST web services in a manner independent of programming language. This is a big challenge.

Regarding the new concepts introduced, the book is a comprehensive material and the challenge results in finding the limits of a particular programming environment.

Silviu Dumitrescu silviu.dumitrescu@msg-systems.com Java consultant @ .msg systems Romania

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The guide contains design procedures for REST web service, both client and server, but also addresses issues of performance, scalability, reliability and security.

The first remarkable information that you can learn from this book is that in 2000 Roy Fielding introduced an architectural style known as Representational State Transfer (REST) in his dissertation „Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-Based Software Architectures „.

My mind immediately flew in comparative terms, and I imagine the times when we will also have, in Romania, thesis topics on software architectures. The answer is complicated, but maybe in 10 years, with a lot of work, it’s possible! The future is yours!

The book is divided into 14 chapters and 5 appendices. The author gradually presents all resources involved in cresting and consuming a web REST service. Each chapter is structured in form of a recipe, the problems are expressed through „How to...” or „When and how...” methods, then solutions are given and eventually discussions on the topics.

Web REST services have emerged as an alternative to SOAP-based web services. They use the HTTP protocol, but are not limited to them. Unlike SOAP, REST does not require XML parsing and does not require a message header to and from the service provider. Due to the HTTP transport protocol, REST uses three communication methods between client

and server: • GET, for obtaining reliable information and idempotent • POST, for creating a new resource, for modifying one or more resources, for running applications with large inputs or for performing any unsafe or non-idempotent operations, when no other HTTP method seems right • PUT, for creating new resources only when customers can decide upon the URI of resources, otherwise POST will be used • DELETE, for deleting a resource If we refer to entities and the connection with a persistent module, we can take into account the usage of the four methods using the following template: • GET, for queries • PUT, for update • DELETE, for deleting • POST, for creating The way in which we group or combine resources is also of interest, regarding the communication. These actions have relevance to performance growth and traffic limitation.

As we know, any of the methods can be Consumer and Producer. In addition, each method can demand the type of resource which it produces or consumes. Choosing the type of resource is difficult. The main types of representations that the author

business

describes are: • XML, for any representation • JSON, for any representation, but JSON compared to XML, can provide performance in parsing • Portable data formats, such as: date, time, numbers, currency • Binary encoded data, such as: video, audio, photo • Errors, in the form of a plain text or an error code. The error codes for is 4xx - for errors due to customer input data, and 5xx - for server deployment errors or due to the current state Resources are identified through URIs. How an URI is built has a great importance in avoiding ambiguities and finding resources. The author describes several elements needed for creating URIs, but also some of the best practices, such as „How to Keep URIs Cool” in section 4.4., for example.

A particular chapter, Chapter 5, deals with the web links topic. These web links exist in XML, JSON representations, in headers and at the client. Building URI templates is efficient because it offers URI dynamicity, clients being able to include additional information in URI, before sending the server request.

Atom and AtomPub formats define resources such as entries and feeds, their representation and an operating protocol on these resources. REST web services

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE support this type of format, in addition to those previously mentioned.

St ar ting wit h chapter 7, the author presents advanced elements in REST services field. The first topic talked about is ‘content negotiation’, more precisely pointing out the client preferences such as: supported media types, language, character encoding etc. .

Using the cache is a very important aspect, because used properly it lowers the delays perceived by the user, increases confidence, reduces costs and overload and server load.

Based on updates frequency, we can establish an exact period of time for which the cache can serve a representation.

A new challenge that leads to performance is given by conditional requests.

This conditional request reveals two problems: for GET requests it helps clients and caches to identify weather a certain representative can be considered new and for PUT, POST and DELETE requests, the conditional requests provide competition control. Competition control is implemented in two ways: • Pessimistic competition: the clients blocks the resource • Optimistic competition: by inserting a version token, that is validated

the Glassfish server. Most of the tests I have done were a success; however there are still a lot to be tested. Therefore, I ask you, readers of this book review, to try to implement in JAVA EE6 all the problems raised by the author in this book.

If you manage to go through all the books pages and create examples, I consider that REST won’t have any uncertainties for you. Looking forward to any debates on this topic.

As always, I wish you to enjoy the reading of this book!

Silviu Dumitrescu

The followings part contains various topics related to a resource: how a resource can be copied, moved, undo-ed and more.

Chapter 11 makes important references regarding this matter.

Chapter 12, the security chapter, describes the aspects related to resources access, through authentication and confidentiality, integrity, preventing access to malicious or unauthorized clients.

The last chapter deals with extensibility and versioning and makes references to URI compatibilities, XML and JSON representations, atmos extension and so on.

I found the book content very complex.

Some questions arose after reading the book, mainly because some of the features I haven’t tested in Java. At this moment I do not know which of the topics mentioned in the book cannot be supported by www.todaysoftmag.com | no. 11/May, 2013

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HR

Towards An It Community – Via HR

A

lot of people want a kind of Silicon Valley in Cluj, with innovative and creative companies. IT Cluster aims a similar goal. In a four articles series, Danis Consulting aims to analyse these companies from Human Resources perspective, how they evolved, their problems and, the most important, how they can constitute a real community to be proud about.

The idealistic part Dan Ionescu

dan.ionescu@danis.ro Executiv director @ Danis Consulting

Cristina Nicule

cristina.nicule@danis.ro Consultant @ Danis Consulting

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A mature community of IT professionals and companies that sustain each other and make clients all over the world look towards Cluj with great interest – seems like a dream. A beautiful dream! There was once somebody else who said “I have a dream!”…

What is the reality now in Cluj? Those about 9.000 employees from IT companies are the most critical resource. All companies fight for attracting new employees and, apparently, the incomes are the only motivator. There are also additional “incentives”: playing areas, ping-pong tables, massage and other “must-have-s” that could make employees from other industries extremely jealous.

On the other hand, the declared target of employees needed in this market is 20.000 people. Seems like the gap between what is it now and the community that needs to be built is quite big.

A VISION and a great amount of IDEALISM are obviously needed. Without these two ingredients, the IT market in Cluj will remain a source of short-term financial gain, especially for entrepreneurs abroad. There is a great risk for all companies in the market, especially because loan / outsourcing business type represents a big percentage in the total market and is so unpredictable.

In 2015 Cluj-Napoca will be European

Youth Capital, and in 2020 – we hope – it will become European Cultural Capital.

These are moment of great pride for local community and also a measurement for the maturity of this community. That is why the need for VISION is vital

The real part

Firma Danis Consulting lucrează de 15 ani îThe Danis Consulting Company works for 15 years in the Organisational Development field. We have worked with several ITC organisations; therefore we believe we came to know pretty well the particularities of this industry and some ways for developing. We would like to contribute to the creation of a solid and durable community in Cluj. And this is not idealism at all – solid companies mean successful businesses, win-win for everybody.

These are the reasons for which we have started “pro-bono” a research project, in which we will meet quarterly, for about two hours, with a group of HR professionals from Cluj IT companies. The purposes of these meeting are: a. Analysis of their main problems and reaching some solutions for them and their companies; b. Identification of successful managerial practices that could be shared to the IT community; c. Finding mechanisms to strengthen

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE local IT community.

The results of these discussions, but also some final conclusions, will be the basis for a research available for all interested.

After each meeting we will make public the conclusions, through our media partner Today Software Magazine. During the launching event organised by TSM, we will be more that pleased to debate issues from the article with all interested persons.

Because our interest and experience is linked to the way companies are lead, at different levels, we have proposed a series of topics to be discussed in the project’s meetings: 1. How did Cluj IT companies developed? What were the best leadership behaviours that facilitated growth? What were the worst – that inhibited development? Conclusions may help companies to continue to develop and grow successfully.

2. Which are the particularities of the leadership style in the present? In example, it may be discussed: the factors that create trust in leaders, how to run teams of very young and creative people, IQ versus EQ etc. Being lots of interesting topics, we will expect two meeting in this category.

3. What helps and what stops creating an open IT community? How could present obstacles that created a “feudalist” environment be overcome (each company with its own interests, a lot of egos, strong competition among them – but not necessarily a market competition, etc.) How can we move towards modern concepts, like helping each other to be all more attractive to clients from all over the world?

We wish that these meetings should be less formal and more than a networking opportunity.

First meeting An overview regarding the first meeting:

similar to “opening the Pandora’s box” in the positive sense of the expression. Some of the most interesting topics, regarding the success in IT companies, were shared during this discussion; in the following meetings we will go deeper into some issues such as: “What is the most appropriate leadership style for IT professionals?” or “How do you manage to create real team work – with collaboration, communication and reciprocal help?”

The most valuable shared ideas from this first workshop are presented in the following main chapters:

1. Development of IT professionals În acest domeniu există de regulă aboRegarding this issue, there is usually the logical approach: to develop certain behaviour / experience when it is observed a specific need. We were glad to find out that management from these companies reached the conclusion that trainings alone (especially those aiming relationships, team work, communication abilities) are not enough in order to develop or change a certain behaviour. iQuest has a series of examples regarding this conclusion. Also Accesa has implemented recently a Development Program – that aimed the management team and the next level of leaders in the company – in which trainings were combined with other development actions like: establishing and implementing individual objectives, coaching, workshops, with the guidance of external consultants.

This is one of the main reasons why we – as a consultancy company –are trying also, for the past years, to promote “development programs” instead of just trainings, programs that contains also some other activities (e.g. follow-up workshops, group or individual coaching sessions, applicative projects etc.). These Programs lasts a longer period of time, thus permitting practicing the new abilities, using them in the real working context.

Apart from this approach of developing employees, we have found in ISDC for example, a different way to think about the development process. The Human Resources specialists are those who take responsibility for many development actions – delivering internal trainings and team-buildings, according to well-established systems and procedures. Being close to their colleagues, they are able to intervene in a proactive manner, not only when problems arise.

The purpose was to analyse the past of the IT companies in order to find examples of good practices (or bad ones) from which we all be able to learn. We realised during the discussions that it was difficult to keep the “track” to the past tense, the participants coming recurrently in the present.

Afterwards, we realised it is possible that this artefact might be, again, very specific to IT industry – a dynamic, permanently changing environment that lives mostly in the present.

2. Successful Systems and Processes in IT Thus, the result of this first meeting is companies

The Human Resources systems and processes tend to be perceived by IT employees as bureaucratic and, therefore, easily rejected. Some solutions for successfully implement these kinds of instruments can be: • Using managers for making some processes more flexible. If leaders (from different levels in a company) have the responsibility for some evaluations, decisions, employee interventions, then the systems may be more flexible and easy to implement.

• Another solution is that the systems should be born naturally from successful practices – it is impossible to reject what you have already done successfully.

It is exactly the experience of ISDC organisation – which has level 3 of CMMI certification, using the existent processes.

During the discussions it was agreed that implementing good, mature systems and procedures may be done successfully in organisations where people have mature attitudes.

We hope that, in the future meetings, we will go deeper into the topic of performance evaluation systems from different companies. This time, Răzvan Voica from iQuest offered us a synthetic image of his company’s “career management” system for employees’ evaluation and development. It is a very interesting and complex system in which the responsibility for employees’ development is mainly upon managers shoulders.

Cut it short, every leader from the company is also a “career manager” for a number of employees. He has the responsibility to guide them in their process of development.

Therefore, in the case of iQuest managers, communication and coaching abilities are very valuable.

3.Organisational culture and working style in IT The representatives of the IT companies present in this first workshop admit the general market tendency towards a greater flexibility and independence of workforce, but, in the same time, they realise that Cluj IT employees and companies aren’t still prepared for this. Senior IT professionals may appreciate more the flexible time – in example, at ISDC it was implemented a home-working system: one day per week for employees that have more than 6 months in the company. Juniors and not only “manifest – until a certain point in their career – a normal need for affiliation to a group / a community” which working in a company

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HR Towards An It Community – Via HR can provide for them. For now, Cluj IT market isn’t mature enough to allow an employee a liberty such as: when I enter in a project, I have also the freedom to enter in another project, from a different company, in parallel.

Fortech applied an organisational culture receipt that is very open, transparent and warn towards employees. The top management manifested all the time “sincerity and transparency. Organisational culture grew beautifully, basing itself upon some principles established back then, in the beginning of the company”. In addition, another distinctive element of Fortech was recruiting the best technical professionals.

Discussing about organisational culture, fundamental values – those things that are the most appreciated in the company – we have reached together a conclusion drawn from the participants’ experience: in order for an IT company to ensure long-term stability, it is highly needed to establish in the first time a clear set of values – that describe the “personality” of an organisation (“how we are, how things are in our organisation”). Then, it is vital to choose the people you work with, taking into account their values, their attitudes, their ways of being. Of course, the technical criteria are also important, but they need to be smartly balanced with those who describe the personality of a potential employee. In extremis, the participants gave us examples of situations in which some candidates – very good technically – were rejected because of their attitude, character incompatibility with organisational values. Well-matched people with their organisation, regarding their way of thinking, their attitudes, are those people who tend to have better performance than those how are far from the way of being in that company (even if they have exceptional knowledge). Regarding this topic, the challenge for HR specialists and top management of the company is to maintain this “spine” of values, regardless of the obstacles and problems in the present Cluj labour market.

“If people who come to our employment interviews don’t have sparkled eyes when we

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present our technologies/processes, they are for everybody, although it becomes more not the right people for us.” and more difficult to accomplish this considering the size of the company.

4. The leading process in IT companies

Another subject, about which we just “embittered” the debates, refers to the right or successful leaders in IT. In these organisations we have encountered different principles, like: „Leadership is crucial in any organisation that wants a systemic development of the Human Resources. They need to be involved in passing forward” [from their model, from their abilities and attitudes].

Starting the discussion about the leaders from the top of the companies – that may be CEO, Administrators or even the founders – we have realised that, usually, this person represents the one that sets the standard in the company and people – at least Romanian IT professionals – need this leader who has a vision for his organisation. People need models and believe in successful images. We have also discussed a little bit about the importance of the charisma in the top leader. Even if we have discovered different styles of charisma in different companies, our conclusion is that – at least for these four companies – the leader from the top was clearly a successful factor in the growth and stability of the company. Sometimes, attractive and inspirational speeches are those who attract people around their leader and coagulate organisational culture; other times, the structure and consistency in approaching a certain type of business help.

Participants

Alexandra Bayer (Fortech) started the works in IT field seven years ago, when she became a member of Fortech. Practically, she grew together with the company and learned together with their management colleagues how to gain the trust from the IT people: with logical, concrete, statistical arguments. The basic engineer profession helped her a lot in this structured approach of the Human Resources activity. Even now, when in Fortech are almost 300 employees, Alexandra sees herself as a helped for the entire company, as having “eyes and ears”

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Raluca Pop (ISDC) is a psychologist as a profession and has a 13 years Human Resources experience, and three years IT field experience. When she talks about what she does in ISDC, she clearly manifests enthusiasm and pride – things that are very important and valued in ISDC culture.

Răzvan Voica (iQuest) has an “old” background in IT (from 1997), having a great diversity of professional experiences, including that of a programmer. From 2011 he joined the management team in iQuest – one of the important players in IT market in Cluj (and not only). He admits that this job – a managerial position in Human Resources – was difficult and very challenging for him. Since his start in iQuest, he initiated and developed many HR Systems and processes, about which he is willing to speak with pride and passion for hours!

Cristina Puiu (Accesa), psychologist as a profession, covers the Human resources activity in a smaller company than the other 3 represented in this workshop, but being in a great expansion. The growth dynamic of Accesa company – from 20 to 60 employees in one year – gave Cristina important challenges regarding the HR activity. Her previous experience in recruiting companies and auto industry made her deal successfully this job.

HR

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

Performance Management

U

nlike the other articles published in the previous issues, this one will have several parts. The first part offers a definition of performance management and process and the tools used for its implementation. In a dynamic environment in which companies put more and more emphasis on employee development, every organization around the globe tried defining those elements that contribute to the creation of a successful organizational environment.

Their goal is to determine the performance indicators for an organization with high results. External environmental requirements are forcing companies to adapt to international competition and be able to be competitive simultaneously in terms of price, quality, flexibility and customer relationships. Managers have developed an interest in creating an organizational culture oriented towards performance and excellence.

Specialized publications describe High Performance Organizations as the organizations having exceptional financial results, customer and employee satisfaction, high productivity. They are organizations that encourage innovation and the development of leadership skills. However, in a closer study of specialized literature we can identify characteristics of each category: sustainable financial development, longterm orientation, obtaining exceptional results, which refers only to the company as a whole and the results thereof.

In 2007, Waal gave a definition of high performance organizations, comparing his own company’s financial and non-financial performance with those in the same field on a period of time comprised between 5 and 10 years. Thus a competitive company develops a sustainable market strategy to gain a competitive advantage, compared to other companies in same field.

The evolution of human resources during the last 50 years is impressive: from the „personnel” dealing with legislation (employment contracts, labor protection, and the personal files of employees) to „human resources”. The difference between the two concepts is more than obvious from a mere reading of the two concepts. When you say human resources you think about resources that can be exploited in order to achieve results for the company. This area has as its important functions: recruitment and selection, evaluation, training,

motivation and reward, and legislative and administrative services.

The concept of human resources is an umbrella for the concept of personnel, enclosing it and giving new functions and tasks. For a long time it seemed that the term best defined everything it happened in this department, but it turned out not to be so, simply because the ‚human resources’ are constantly developing.

The term that best describes the department is ‘talent management’. This term puts emphasis on the human potential and a close correlation between individual goals and the company. Two other popular terms besides ‘human resources’ are ‘coaching’ and ‘mentoring’, two impressive concepts supporting the discovery of human potential in an extended, personal and professional development. It is very important that people improve their aptitudes and skills.

This improved definition of personnel, human resources and talent management shows a continuous evolution in this tech era.

Performance management is in close correlation with talent management. The performance evaluates individual and team goals that are consistent with the strategic objectives of the company. For the company to gain that competitive edge in a market constantly changing, it needs to harness the talents it has.

The concept of performance in a simple analysis of dictionary definitions seems to have a multi-purpose nature. It can mean „implementation”, i.e. fulfillment of requirements or requests; it can be defined as a „competence” / ability to do something.

For a clearer understanding of this concept, a close study of specialized literature is needed. Lebas (1995) characterizes performance as having an impact in the future. A successful business is one that achieves its defined objectives. Thus, the performance

is about capability and future.

Folan (2007) emphasizes three governing objectives of the performance to be analyzed by each entity within the environment where it decides to work.

Secondly, performance is about one or more goals established by the entity whose performance is analyzed. And thirdly, performance is reduced to relevant and recognizable characteristics.

Strategic management performance involves aligning individual and team objectives with those of business development. It aims at creating a culture of learning to devote time and resources for improving organizational performance.

This concept was initiated only in the twentieth century by Peter Drucker in his book „Concept of the Corporation „. Until the ‚80s research has focused on two areas: the impact of strategic planning on business performance and importance of strategic planning role in making strategic decisions.

O p e r a t i o n a l l y, P e r f o r m a n c e Management refers to operations management, because it focuses on objectives and targets of departments, project or team.

Federick Taylor developed the concept of scientific management.

In the early ‚20 General Motors has experienced this concept by introducing the DuPont graph to support the reorganization of the company in decentralized structures with profit centers.

In the ‚30s in France introduced the „dash board” to monitor the operational performance of organizations. Although the majority of French companies were already using it, the concept had a minimum spread abroad. The roots of Performance Management nowadays have been established by the Japanese philosophy.

Employee performance management is considered to reflect the level of organizational maturity. In the early 1800s, Owen monitored the performance of employees

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HR Performance Management as individuals who perform tasks as part of a group. Only after World War II the performance management system was mostly used in public administration, military and industrial plants. Since the 90s, individual performance management has been refocused on two trends. The first is about increasing self-assessment performance, and the second aims at aligning strategic and employee performance management by creating new tools such as the Balanced Scorecard, which wanted to reflect the organizational objectives into the individual ones.

Figure 1 Performance management project phases

Process fundamentals

Performance management aims to increase responsibility in producing results and to improve skills and competencies. In the company, performance management has always been considered an issue for human resources management in order to achieve organizational goals, through alignment with the organization’s strategy, values and culture.

Process and Tools

The figure The phases of performance management describes the stages of the process as it takes place in the company during a year.

• Defining the four phases of the process: (1) Define expectations, (2) Interim evaluation, (3) Monthly review of goals and (4) Evaluation of the final performance. The Performance Management Process has two essential characteristics: • Emphasizing WHAT (results), HOW (the methods by which results are achieved) and WHERE (personal development plan, professional objectives).

• Improving communication between the manager and employee by creating an ongoing dialogue based on feedback and coaching.

Elements of Performance Management

Performance evaluation should reflect the expectations and achievements should be oriented on goals and values. In addition to this, they must meet the customers’ expectations.

I will further present the way in which the relationship between the values of the organization and process of Performance Management is defined. Values that reflect the methods of the performance management process (HOW) represent the way each employee performs his tasks and achieves his goals. The detailed presentation of the organization’s valuessignals a set of skills that each employee must develop at the highest possible level.

For example, let’s take innovation as a company value or behaviour trait: ‘we are intuitive, curious, practical and intelligent, which enables us to develop new ideas for clients, business and employees. With the global operations we develop, we encourage ideas in any region of the world.’

Encouraging positive behavior ‘anticipates future trends and identifies opportunities which it capitalizes’.

How to measure this behavior for each objective? It means setting expectations and the way in which employees can meet their objectives taking into consideration behaviors encouraged by

them. The second part of the article will provide details about the means of performance management. Until the next issue, be successful in defining the process and tools that best fit the company you belong to!

Andreea Pârvu

andreea.parvu@endava.com Recruiter at Endava

Figure 2 The phases of performance management

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HR

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

Maybe, but probably not!

A

lot of people I talked to recently talked about a wish to do something, unfortunately it remains a lot of the time just a wish.

We each have a “I wanna work out”, “I want to read more”, “I want to eat healthier”, “I want to wake up earlier” and so on …

We really, really wish for those things, we wish to start them, we wish to keep at them, we are really motivated but even so … nothing happens.

We are really motivated! Are we?

We define motivation as that drive the gets us moving to start and then maintain a specific action.

But what is motivation really? (besides the most used word in the world next to “from tomorrow”).

It is indeed one of the least understood concepts. That is because it became sort of an umbrella concept that we use to explain why stuff doesn’t get done.

We know how it feels when we are motivated, we can recognize the drive. Can we say objectively how it appears or how and why it is maintained?

I won’t define motivation scientifically.

There are tons of books on this subject.

However, I will give you a trick on how to get started and keep doing the thing you wish, or not do it but without the guilt.

We will use a simple definition of motivation: Motivation is that energy that gets us to feel that the effort needed to do a specific thing is less than the consequences of doing it or the consequences of not doing it.

Anything we do requires effort. That effort has to be worth it. It’s worth it when putting in the effort is surpassed by the benefits of not putting in the effort.

Well … here is the small detail: All this is clear so far but when in reality we only think about the positive consequences of making the wish reality Whenever we think about “starting to work out” we think about it in terms of all the benefits we will gain. Right? We make a wish to start running from next week, every morning before starting to work, and we think how awesome life would be then.

The problem is that we do not function like that.

Here’s a challenge for you. Bellow you

find a drawing of a rabbit. The puzzle you need to solve is this: The rabbit will run for a longer distance and with a higher speed in which of the two situations: When chased by a hungry and scary wolf or when running after a really, really tasty carrot???

get the running shoes and start running.

IF there are no negative consequences that are real and are present, create them. It is indeed really hard to say … “No, I’ll keep sleeping” when there is a friend waiting for you that will nag you for an entire week if you don’t show up.

If you want to see what are your carrots and wolves my suggestion is to look at the things in your life that you do and keep doing and ask yourself “why?”. Why do you still do them? If you analyze the reasons you will notice a pattern (a profile) and will be able to apply it to the other things you wish done.

If you need to know more about motivation bellow are two great books and an awesome TED talk.

Daniel Pink – DRIVE BF Skinner – Beyond Freedom and Dignity

The answer is that probably it will start running for both reasons. But when running gets tough and the rabbit is all sweaty and tired it will keep running from the wolf. About the carrot the poor little rabbit will probably say “neah, the carrot is to sour anyway”.

It’s great the we don’t run just because of the wolfs. It’s great to have so nice and yummy carrots. But carrots alone won’t get us to wake up and start running.

If we know this in theory (surely, the Thank you for not running while rearabbit theory) why don’t we use it conscio- ding the article! usly in real life?

So, the small trick is when you wish for something don’t just think and imagine how awesome life would be if you would make the wish reality. Think of how unawesome it would be if you don’t.

Because in the morning, when the sleep is the sweetest, and the sheets feel like heaven, and every part of your body is really Antonia Onaca anto@aha-ha.com enjoying the sleep and has no desire to get moving it won’t be the awesome life pertrainer and consultant spective that will get us to say … NO! This is too good so I’ll stop feeling this good and www.todaysoftmag.com | no. 11/May, 2013

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startup

The Imagine Cup Rollercoaster

I

magine Cup is an annual competition hosted by Microsoft to promote innovation and their technologies. Teams of up to four students, in the timespan of one year, take the challenge of writing an application that would support the Millennium Development Goals. This year however, the theme requirements were removed, giving us the freedom of making a fun game that didn’t have the responsibility of ending world hunger. I postponed participating to Imagine Cup since my first year in university. I used to tell myself “Maybe next year I’ll find a fun idea and hone my skills. I’ll try next year”. But this was the start of my third year, and with only two years until graduation, I didn’t have many „next years” left. I had to do something.

JavaScript

Every year Microsoft announces the technologies students are required to use in their projects. Among the allowed technologies for last year was HTML5. What?

HTML5 isn’t a Microsoft technology! Yet there it was, on their website. And we could use it to build an incredible 3D game using JavaScript and WebGL. I spent the next month reading articles by Douglas Crockford and John Resig. I wrote a bunch of ‚experiments’ that would never see the light of day. My goal was to make an entire game engine in JavaScript from scratch.

Input system, graphics, audio, everything.

We would then use our engine to build an awesome ‚fun’ game. We had a somewhat working input system, and the skeleton of the graphics system. I wrote a plugin for

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Blender to export our 3D models and another tool to convert a glsl shader to json files. The engine could load a 3D model exported from Blender and render it using the shader. It was awesome and it worked. But then the rules for Imagine Cup 2013 came out, and HTML5 was no longer supported.

By now I had invited two of my trusted friends to join us: Timotei Dolean and Soucup Adrian. They are the best programmers I know and my best university buddies. Together I felt we had the potential to make this happen. We didn’t want to make any stupid mistakes, so we agreed we would not start coding until we had every aspect of the game figured out. To begin with, we had to choose between a 2D or a 3D game. 2D graphics are much harder to make, and a 3D world would introduce an additional dimension that our game logic would have to take care of. Also, we felt like in order for our game to be fun, it needed a physics engine. So we gathered in weekends, we talked about ideas and we watched playthroughs of other games. We wanted to build a simple, short game, that would have easy to understand mechanics and creative puzzles built on top of those mechanics. Whatever the final idea was it had to be fun, simple to understand and require imagination and skill to solve.

In a few weeks we slowly began to piece everything together.

Our game would have 3D graphics but a 2D world. The physics would be 2D as well.

It would involve alien technology. The puzzles would require the player to use different forces and technologies to move things around and repair a damaged ship. We would have cubes that the player could use to create

no. 11/May, 2013 | www.todaysoftmag.com

special objects with different properties to reach his goals. For instance: 10 cubes could be used to create a gravity switch machine. One cube could be used to create a small ramp to allow the other cubes to pass gaps. Another cube could be used to create a power source for a device already functional. We liked where this was going.

Unity

Now that we had the general idea in place, we had to choose the technology we would be using. The mobile platform and the XBOX were out of the question, simply because we didn’t have the necessary technology. So we were left with the PC. Following an interesting topic in the Imagine Cup forums, we discovered we were allowed to use game engines such as Unity or even Unreal as long as we also used Microsoft products ( such as C# scripts in Unity ). „Awesome” we thought.

Getting the engine out of the way would allow us to focus more on the actual game.

So all the members installed Unity and tried some tutorials. We created a demo in which a bunch of cubes would follow the mouse and would break if you hit them hard against the walls. Unity had everything we needed, including a very fancy editor that you could use to drag and drop items to create your game. There was a lot of dragging and dropping, and not enough scripting. Not that scripts weren’t useful, or powerful enough, they were somehow second class citizens. And the engine was complex enough to give the team members shivers when thinking about learning it.

And this was only the beginning. We soon

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

realized that our Free version of Unity didn’t have render targets. That meant no special effects of any kind. Not even a straightforward glow around our cubes to mark them as selected. This was disappointing. We had all the skills we needed to make these effects, but the engine simply wouldn’t give us the possibility. And we sure weren’t going to pay $1500 for that. So for the second time we threw everything away and started from scratch.

XNA

Our last choice was the XNA ( XNA’s Not an Acronym ) framework. It’s a lightweight framework on top of DirectX and it offered us all the power we needed: an abstraction layer complete with tools and mathematical libraries. We were finally ready to start developing our game. We had the basic idea and we’ve chosen a proper technology. Too bad it took us over five months to get here. We set up a git repository ( and a gitlab client ) on our server, prepared our environments ( XNA doesn’t work with Visual Studio 2012 out of the box ) and we separated the tasks among us. We needed an artist, and I was the closest thing in our team.Andi was going to integrate the physics system and implement the game logic, Adrian was going to write our renderer and shaders and Timotei was going to work on the UI and input. We slowly hacked at it, using Skype daily to communicate. The game idea also changed a bit along the way. We added a main character to the story: a small triangle shaped robot that walks on caterpillar tracks and possesses interesting abilities. We attempted a few graphics styles but we weren’t very pleased with the results. Some problems came from the camera angles and the way textures were filtered, but mostly they had to do with my poor artistic skills. The physics

engine ended up b e aut i f u l ly integrated with the game. Andi had the ideea of simulating the caterpillar tracks with physics instead of having the whole robot be a single 3D model, I exported each piece separately ( one wheel, one thread, one body ) and Andi used them to construct the whole robot as a system of physically simulated components. This means that when you move the robot left, you’re actually rotating the 3 wheels. It’s the physics system that does all the work of moving the threads and making the robot move. This has proven to be the single most important decision we made concerning the game design.

In April we had to send the game for the qualification round despite being nowhere near completion. The team worked through the night to make a playable demo. We wrote code like mad. Adding features and fixing bugs without blinking..

Early in the morning we hacked together a few gameplay recordings into an epic trailer featuring a story about a brave robot standing tall against a merciless universe. Yeah, it didn’t have anything to do with our game.

And judging from the graphics, we had a total mess. Most of the textures were hastly snatched from google and our in game tips were rendered with an awful red font that was almost impossible to read. We think it was the physics engine that got as through the round. But we also had a working level and ( fancy or not ) 3D graphics.

We only received word of qualifying one week before the finals. We had five days to make the game look presentable, so we spammed the TODO list with features: a second level, better graphics, new textures, a depth of field effect, a total rework of the user

interface and many many others. One day before the finals and there were still unfinished tasks. The depth of field needed to be improved. The tooltips needed to be improved. The main menu still needed to be improved. We lacked some textures. We only had 24 hours until the presentation but if experience had tought us anything, is that we’re highly productive under pressure.

Alex Pana

alex.pana@vertexarmy.org internship student @ Tora trading

www.todaysoftmag.com | no. 11/May, 2013

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others

Gogu and the gas filling

G

ogu took - slowly, as usual – the food tray, and started looking for Misu. It took him a few seconds to find him.

Dude, this Misu has a very bad habit to always sit in the farthest corner of the dining room; he amused himself while walking towards his colleague. He replied to the greetings and felt somewhat important seeing how many people paused from eating to salute him or to wish him good appetite. After all, I’ve been working for some time now in this firm... He sat satisfied near Misu, smiled at him, and realized instantly the major error he had committed.

- Uff, Gogu, tell me what should I do?

Shut up and let me eat my food; that is what you should do.

Obviously Gogu said it only to himself; he couldn’t have upset Misu more than he was already. He really liked this young man, calm even in the most critical situations, talking softly and with a strong Transylvanian accent that he hadn’t lost in college, neither in the multinational company they had been working together for some time. I alone can get him out of his silence and calm – Gogu giggled, still to himself. He forced a grimace on his face and sighed prepared - for at least the tenth time that day – to listen to Misu’s lamentation.

- See Gogu? It makes you groan too. Now what can I say? I feel like going to Chief...

He stopped suddenly, with his hands in the air, waiting for the verbal prosecution to follow the movement. „Gogu, you’re a genius!” He gazed in all directions (He’s like a radar! thought Gogu) and stood as soon as he had located Chief. And as his attention was focused on the table where Chief quietly enjoyed his lunch, Misu didn’t realize when he tapped the tray, and neither the noise that the cutlery had done when falling on the ground. The glass of water swayed undecided and dropped on Gogu, who got stunned, unable to utter a word, incapable of understanding what was his merit in the whole story. But he jumped up as soon as the improvised waterfall drained on his knees. The whole incident seemed unreal, detached from a movie whose script was totally unknown to him, therefore, with an undisguised curiosity, he followed Misu.

The noise of the cutlery and the heavy-footed scrolling of the two men attracted the attention of the other colleagues, so by the time they had reached Chief ’s table, all eyes were on them.

- Chief, you have to help me! I have no solution, you know the deadline is too tight, and we promised to deliver on time, but now all resources are taken by that project in England. And I kept asking around, but no one is willing to help me and I’m desperate, and Gogu is my witness... he turned theatrically towards the latter.

Cool-headed, Chief finished chewing his mouthful, stared at Misu and said: - You too enjoy, Misu!

Hi-hi, if you wanted this to be a subtle irony, you did great, Gogu laughed under the mustache. It was obviously far too subtle for Misu or at least for the state of excitement he was in. He proceeded

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no. 11/May, 2013 | www.todaysoftmag.com

without even blinking: - You too Chief! So what do you say? Will you help me with an external resource? Only for two or three weeks.

- Misu, you’re like a lightning! What’s with this speed and verbose, it’s not like you. And you Gogu wipe that grin under the mustache; do you have anyone available for Misu’s project? Or maybe you have budget for external resources, eh?

- What people Chief? You’ve already taken two of my men. I can’t give him anyone else!

He then thought about the budget and realized that Chief had made fun of him.

- Come on, Chief! Are you kidding us?!!!

- Well, who started it, lads? What money for external resources? Misu, you know that we are on a low budget; your only chance is to renegotiate the deadline. We can’t do everything at once, and the company says that now there are other priorities. That’s it! If there’s no budget, then nothing else is....

- Just ‚one’, Chief, Misu mumbled with his last resources! Just one man, at least two weeks, how much can it cost?

- Well Misu, you know the joke of the gasoline drop?

Misu nodded as a „no”. There comes a lesson, Chief couldn’t have miss an entire dining room as audience, Gogu said to himself while pulling a chair to sit more comfortable. Chief frowned for a second but he was too eager to tell the story so he just shook his hands and continued: - There was this man that went to the gas station and asked the pump guy: „ - How much does a drop of gasoline cost? - Get out of here, man, it costs nothing, zero lei! the guy answered. - Great, then please fill me up drop by drop...” So Misu, in your case, one resource is no big deal, but one today, two tomorrow...

Simona Bonghez, Ph.D.

simona.bonghez@confucius.ro Speaker, trainer and consultant project management, Owner al Confucius Consulting

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