I just completed a video that accompanies my latest research on mobile consumer behaviors, and the strategies retailers must implement. If you design, develop or deploy customer facing apps, this content is relevant and important.

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With another year coming to a close, it’s time to dust off the crystal ball for our annual predictions. However, before we forecast any new insights, I want to look back at our 2015 predictions, which could be best summarized as a maturing of technology innovations introduced in prior years. Now that the fundamentals are in place, there’s potential for significant shifts in both software and vendor shakeups in 2016. The emerging battleground of innovation continues to heat up between companies that make technology versus those that use it. Success will be determined by a company’s ability to leverage and monetize its data and API assets, drive contextual interactions with customers, along with its organizational agility to react to competitive forces. Here is Part One of our 2016 predictions.

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All eyes appeared to be on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2016 in Las Vegas since last week, as more than 3,600 companies unveiled the IoT and IIoT innovations we can all expect to see in the coming year. This year’s CES showcased plans to make the car a complete mobile office-with technology in place to allow Skype calls and the use of Microsoft 365 from the car. The other hot theme at CES was drones – not a surprise since these unmanned crafts have pulled us in like a tracker-beam to the mother ship. The autonomous ‘copter drone was one of the most impressive releases with the reality that the businessman of tomorrow doesn’t need a private jet, just a ‘copter drone and a smart phone.

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I recently spotted a five-year-old blog post by Mike Gualtieri of Forrester, where he suggests firing your quality assurance (QA) team to improve your quality. He got the idea from a client who actually tried and succeeded with this counterintuitive move.
The thinking goes that without a QA team to cover for them, developers are more likely to take care of quality properly – or risk getting the dreaded Sunday morning wakeup call to fix something.

Gualtieri’s post generated modest buzz at the time, but since 2011 the world has changed. DevOps has turned a corner, representing an end-to-end rethink of how organizations handle the entire software development lifecycle.

Now that 2016 has finally arrived, it’s time to take a fresh look at the question. But why stop with QA? Now that we have DevOps – and digital transformation more broadly – whom else can we fire?

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Most of the Java developers I know don’t like JavaScript. Initially. They would give you different reasons why, but the real one is simple: too much to learn to make it work. For many Java developers creating the front end of a Web application in JavaScript is a chore to write and a burden to maintain. Nevertheless JavaScript rules in Web development and the new version of JavaScript (ES6) will make it even more popular.

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Fujitsu and Grid Dynamics have teamed up to create the Cloud Commerce Platform to empower retailers with best-of-breed hardware, software and services for faster digital innovation.
Retailers are under immense pressure to innovate faster. Working with them over the years, we have come to intimately understand their challenges. With the explosion of digital touch points and the expectation of a unified experience throughout a shopper’s journey across the channels, retailers must innovate at an unprecedented pace while performing flawlessly even as traffic peaks.

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If a slow or unresponsive application on your mobile device or PC has ever left you feeling angry, frustrated and unproductive, you’re not alone. Business success in today’s digital age relies on application performance. Yet according to the Riverbed Global Application Performance Survey 2015, nine out of 10 organizations suffer from poor performance on a regular basis. Executives say the poor performance of enterprise applications has negatively impacted their work on a regular basis. Consequently, this performance gap between the needs of the business and IT’s ability to deliver leads directly to delays, missed deadlines, angry customers and damaged brands.

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Are you someone who knows that the number one rule in DevOps is “Don’t Panic”? Especially when it comes to making Continuous Delivery changes inside your organization? Are you someone that theorizes that if anyone implements real automation changes, the solution will instantly become antiquated and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable?

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The web community is constantly churning out new technologies that make it easier to develop the applications that savvy users are demanding. It may be obvious, but new technologies often require new ways of thinking about testing – sometimes new tools, other times entirely new testing methods. You just can’t rely on the same old same old when things change as much as the web does.

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Today on #c9d9 we talked about best practices for orchestrating enterprise software testing. Delivering software faster, but with lower quality, doesn’t help you win in the market.
What are some of the challenges and proven tips and patterns used to test critical software – across all the different supported platforms – quickly and efficiently?

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