In 1997, the Object Management Group (OMG) made the UML a standard modelling language for object-oriented applications. Has the Agile adoption changed the way organizations use UML? Methods & Tools checked the current UML current usage with a poll asking the following question: What is the usage of UML modeling techniques at your location?

August 10, VMware announced a definitive agreement to acquire SpringSource. VMware and SpringSource plan to deliver compelling new solutions that enable companies to more efficiently build, run and manage applications within both internal and external cloud architectures.

This is a (personal) list of articles dealing with unit testing that I like. I have chosen to include material that is longer than the usual (short) blog posting:

* Test Flexibly with AspectJ and Mock Objects

* Automation for the People: Continuous testing

* Exploring The Continuum Of Test Doubles

* Unit Testing With C#

* End to End, or, Another Run on the Hamster Wheel of Life

* In Pursuit of Code Quality: Unit Testing Ajax Applications

* Apply Test-Driven Development to your Database Projects

* What It Means to Mock: Isolating Units for Testing

* Unit testing and Test Driven Development (TDD) for Flex and ActionScript 3.0

* Unit testing Web 2.0 applications using the Dojo Objective Harness

* A Guide to Testing Rails Applications

Additional unit testing article resources

TestDriven.com - Articles Directory
IBM DeveloperWorks

Quality Assurance Links Directory - Articles Section

Software Development Articles, Unit Testing Section

SQA Zone - Articles Directory

Borland Software Corporation announced that Micro Focus International plc and Borland have entered into a definitive agreement under which Micro Focus will acquire all the outstanding shares of Borland in a cash merger transaction. Micro Focus will acquire each outstanding share of common stock of Borland for $1.00 per share, representing a premium of 25% over the closing share price of Borland’s common stock on May 5, 2009 of $0.80 and a premium of approximately 67% over the average thirty trading day closing price of $0.60. The aggregate transaction value is approximately $75 million.

Borland discreetly announces this week the resignation of both Tod Nielsen, CEO since 2005, going to VMware as COO, and Peter Morowski, SVP of research and development, leaving the company to pursue other opportunities. Borland will also reduce its workforce by approximately 130 employees, or approximately 15 percent of its regular full-time staff.

VersionOne has published raw results for the 3rd Annual State of the Agile Survey that was conducted in June and July 2008. Answers were received from 3061 participants in 80 countries. Participants working in agile projects are satisfied: they think that agile achieves a very good overall project success rate.

This survey was conducted and sponsored by VersionOne in June and July 2008. It received answers from 3061 participants in 80 countries; most of them (70%) were participating to the survey for the first time. The majority of the respondents were agile team leaders, coach or consultants. This could lead to a bias towards a perhaps slightly more optimistic vision of the reality of agile projects. Whether they are agile or not, managers stay managers ;o)

In 2003, Methods & Tools published the article “ASP Tools for Software Development“, where ASP did not stand for Microsoft’s Active Server Pages, but for Application Service Providers. This was the “acronym of the day” for companies that were offering hosted software tools. Most of the companies mentioned in this article are still active today, but there is a new marketing label attached to their activity. The media prefer to speak about SaaS (Software as a Service) or give to this phenomenon the nickname “The Cloud”.

As it was confirmed by a recent Methods & Tools survey, the adoption of agile approaches has been increasing recently. Following these results, I asked software practitioners on different discussion forums to share their opinion about the substance of agile adoption. As agility is now becoming "trendy", we could see a number of organizations that will qualify now themselves as "agile", without implementing the essence of the agile software development practices.