"Modern business relies on multitasking to get work done. Employees are evaluated on their ability to multitask. IT professionals are routinely assigned to multiple projects. Did we always do this? Does multitasking work? What are the real impacts of multitasking? Is there an alternative?"

" A number of commentators have been talking about the perceived dichotomy between Agile techniques and architectural thinking. In the Agile world architecture is often perceived as BDUF (Big Up Front Design) and as a result is frequently overlooked or delayed in the spirit of "YAGNI" (You ain't gonna need it)."

"The results of software estimation are important for stakeholders to take care of team allocation and budgeting. A widely prevalent technique to estimate in Agile has been Planning Poker, which is a consensus based. Does this way of estimating take too much time? Are there other methods which can be employed by experienced practitioners?"

"We can query an application's state to find out the current state of the world, and this answers many questions. However there are times when we don't just want to see where we are, we also want to know how we got there."

" Monitoring-Oriented Programming, abbreviated MOP, is a software development and analysis framework aiming at reducing the gap between formal specification and implementation by allowing them together to form a system. In MOP, runtime monitoring is supported and encouraged as a fundamental principle for building reliable software: monitors are automatically synthesized from specified properties and integrated into the original system to check its dynamic behaviors during execution. When a specification is violated or validated at runtime, user-defined actions will be triggered, which can be any code from information logging to runtime recovery. One can understand MOP from at least three perspectives: as a discipline allowing one to improve safety, reliability and dependability of a system by monitoring its requirements against its implementation at runtime; as an extension of programming languages with logics (one can add logical statements anywhere in the program, referring to past or future states); and as a lightweight formal method. "

"Jason Baragry from the Norvegian Computing Center asked me to comment on the relationship bettween MOP and DCI. I originally threw a few comments here. I wanted to go back and comment some more after watching James Coplien's latest video from QCon. James really ticked me off. He embodies -like so many self-proclaimed gurus- what is so wrong with our industry."

" Don Syme overviews some of the basic features of functional languages, presenting why and when they are useful for parallel programming: simplicity, composability, immutability, lightweight reaction, translations, data parallelism, using F# examples but addressing the larger spectrum of functional languages including Haskell, Erlang, Clojure and JavaScript. "

" Object-oriented programming was supposed to unify the perspectives of the programmer and the end user in computer code: a boon both to usability and program comprehension. While objects capture structure well, they fail to capture system action. DCI is a vision to capture the end user cognitive model of roles and interactions between them. "

"Summary: The recent emphasis on regulatory compliance, SOA, and mergers and acquisitions has made the creating and maintaining of accurate and complete master data a business imperative. This paper covers the reasons for adopting master-data management, the process of developing a solution, and several options for the technological implementation of the solution. (12 printed pages)"