The stress test is a very important step when you go live.

Good stress tests help us to:

• ensure that the software meets its performances requirements
• ensure that the service will deliver a fast response time even under a heavy load
• get to now the scalability limits which in turn is useful to plan the next steps of the development

Hadoop is not a web application, a database or a webservice. You don’t stress test a Hadoop job with a heavy load. Instead, you need to becnhmark the cluster which means assessing its performances by running a variety of jobs each focused on a specific field (indexing, querying, predictive statistics, machine learning, …).

Intel has released HiBench, a tool dedicated to run such benchmarks. In this article, we will talk about this tool.

(more…)

The improvement of software factories is one of the current OCTO’s R&D topics. This article presents our vision regarding their future. Before diving into new features and perspectives, let us first describe the concepts and limits of current software factories.

What is a software factory?

A software factory is made of several tools for both development and automation of the overall software building process, from development steps to production delivery. A software factory also contains all the tools required for software development, thus including documentation, wiki and source code manager.
Software factory is important in development industrialization : it is actually the keystone of a continuous integration. Indeed, state-of-the-art software development follows a process based on the software factory. It provides a better control of development quality and progress through indicators.

The following diagram provides an overview of a software factory :

(more…)

In this first part, we introduce hybrid cloud computing, then relying on Amazon Web Services we will try to provide answers to questions related to hybrid infrastructures.

(more…)

In three years, USI has become the reference conference for « geeks » and « bosses » wishing to create Information Technologies that transform our society and our organizations.

During the first editions, we had the great honor to welcome important persons such as Neil Armstrong, Eliyahu Goldratt, Juan Enriquez, Neal Ford, Chris Anderson, Martin Fowler… and many actors of our professions coming from Google, Microsoft, SAP, Mozilla,…

(more…)

OCTO and David Anderson are pleased to announce a Kanban workshop on October 27th and 28th.
This intensive 2-day Kanban workshop with the Kanban pioneer provides an introduction to Lean, Pull Systems and Kanban and will explain how established industrial engineering theory can apply to software development process.

(more…)

To unit test our iPhone developments we rely heavily on Google-Toolbox-for-Mac and OCMock.
After updating to the iphone SDK4 (IOS4) and Xcode 3.2.3 we had an unpleasant surprise : our testing frameworks refused to compile and as of today we have no information about how to solve this situation.
Nevetheless we managed to resolve this problem :
(more…)