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Scala is a programming language that blends functional and object-oriented language features. Scala programs run on the Java Virtual Machine and can easily interact with Java code. Learn how Scala can yield concise, safe, and compatible code and how you can start learning Scala on your own.

Testing regulated software is often seen as a tedious job that generates stacks of documentation and is subject to crippling rules. See five of these assumptions exposed as mere myths, and learn how regulated testers can use the same approaches, techniques, and tools at any other tester's disposal while still passing a process audit.

When your customers aren't complaining about the services you provide, it's easy to assume you have happy customers. But that could be a serious mistake. In this week's column, Naomi Karten describes what happened in two organizations that misinterpreted the absence of customer complaints.

As compared to other development methods, agile is clear, straightforward, and rewarding for all of those who are involved in the process. Most of you know this already—that’s why you’re here! Clearly, a successful transition to agile requires a strong organizational commitment and a number of management and development changes. With that in mind, the white-hot movement to this trend over the past year continues to amaze me. In striking parallel, the industry has seen this same sort of resonance around the trend to the “cloud”—secure anywhere access by distributed teams to a centralized set of services and compute resources that span the complete lifecycle of the development and deployment process.

On the surface, a Broadway musical, a newspaper, and software may not seem to have much—if anything—in common, but they have one common thread. All are delivered on a fixed schedule. But of the three, software tends to stray the most from the fixed schedule. In this week's column, Jeff Patton says that by focusing on the readiness of the entire product—as done in theatrical performances and when publishing a newspaper—and not just on the completion of the planned bits of work, you can produce software on a fixed schedule that you know is ready to ship.

If Agile is going to make a difference to an organization, it must accomplish two things. First, it must assist us in being driven by business needs—not the development organization. Second, it must help us with the entire value stream—not merely part of it. Lean-agile practices presents us with an opportunity to reunite the business and software development organizations so our Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) can focus on value, not merely delivered software.

In a Forrester’s report, The Changing Face Of Application Life-Cycle Management, nearly one-third of enterprises are already using application lifecycle management (ALM) processes and tools, and almost half are aware of it But in conversations with user companies, we find that even those familiar with the term are often hard-pressed to define it.