By next year, 90 percent of large enterprises will include open-source software as business critical elements of their IT portfolios. However, most software development organizations have limited capability to govern the process of selecting, managing, and distributing open-source components-leaving them exposed to unforeseen technical and compliance risks. Larry Roshfeld examines how open-source components-and their dependencies-may expose your company to unforeseen and unnecessary vulnerabilities. He outlines the significant threats to software quality, stability, performance, security, and intellectual property that have occurred using such components. Then, Larry shares an action plan for balancing the risk/reward trade-offs of open-source software in the enterprise. Find out how to ensure that your organization uses only the highest quality open-source components and avoids the common vulnerabilities.

Ever growing software development needs and faster delivery cycles coupled with flat or shrinking IT budgets have brought many organizations to new agile and lean practices. Together, these disruptions are causing a sea of change in the application lifecycle management (ALM) landscape. Although management tools aren’t an explicit focus for most development teams, choosing the right tools for enterprise development is an important factor in keeping everyone productive. Monica Luke discusses the five key imperatives for ALM implementations: in-context collaboration, accelerating time to delivery with real-time planning, improving quality with lifecycle traceability, refining predictability with development intelligence, and reducing costs through continuous improvement. For each imperative, Monica offers concrete examples and lessons learned from real-world implementations. Don’t get lost in the weeds with an ALM tool.

Although many software development teams rely on their QA/Test departments to uncover critical product defects near the end of development, we all recognize the inefficiency of this approach. It’s better to find and fix defects earlier in the software development process to save time and money in the long run! Colby Litnak explores key concepts that encourage and empower developers to take primary responsibility for producing quality software. As with a souped-up race car, developers need specially designed tools and practices when they are at the wheel: fail-fast frameworks, one-click test execution, automated defect prevention principles, automatic notifications of untested code, hurtful test failures, and much more. Discover the principles developers must embrace to produce high quality code the first time-before it goes to QA/Test.

Because the mobile market is extremely dynamic, maintaining consistent application quality is always difficult. Managing the risk exposures with mobile apps and embedded software requires comprehensive testing of a wide variety of platforms operating on multiple networks. Testers have to contend with short development cycles that require continuous QA efforts. Three key building blocks are required to overcome these obstacles: device-agnostic automation, access to a large selection of handsets and tablets, and ways to seamlessly apply your existing testing tools, skills, and knowledge to mobile. From his experience working with enterprises going mobile, Eran Yaniv shares the do's and don'ts for selecting an enterprise-grade mobile testing and automation platform, and offers his analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches.