Perspectives

For more than 5 years, 2 languages have dominated the enterprise software development landscape - Java and C#. Recently, however, this consensus has begun to break down. The interest and demand for different programming languages is being driven by a number of factors: constant pressure for greater developer productivity, increasingly complex business problems, vast amounts of data, and the desire to develop rich applications that run on a plethora of platforms.The recent announcement by Google of the Dart language is just the latest manifestation of this trend.

August saw the Agile 2011 Conference take place in Salt Lake City. Over 1600 people attended the conference to share experiences and learn lessons from expert practitioners. With over 200 sessions, this was probably the largest gathering of Agile experts ever assembled. In a sign of the maturity and mainstream acceptance of Agile, over 60 senior level managers came together in an Executive Forum to discuss the impact that Agile is having on their organizations.

In this issue of Perspectives, Tim Brown talks about some of the subjects that ThoughtWorks presented on, as well as his view of the more interesting topics discussed over the 5 days. Jim Highsmith also shares his experiences of the conference, and revisits a 2001 interview with Ken Schwaber to reflect on how far the industry has come in the last 10 years.

Jez Humble writes about the impediment to rapid deployment that can result from over-complex change management processes. Martin Fowler and Mike Mason discuss Feature Branching. Steve Morgan reports on TW Live 2011.A case study on implementation of an automated deployment pipeline for a global retailer.

How Agile techniques can be brought to the world of Business Intelligence, how traditional data warehousing can potentially be wasteful, and suggests alternatives for storing and visualizing large amounts of data.