What's in the September/October 2014 Better Software Magazine?
In our latest issue of Better Software magazine, our feature articles focus on software licensing and effective ways to improve your team’s approach to process improvement.
You might think software licensing is a pretty boring subject and not a big deal. However, if you have purchased and agreed to the license agreement for an app you just installed, you may ask, “Why doesn’t the software vendor trust me?”
As if creating software to run on a broad range of platforms weren’t difficult enough, enforcing software licensing can also be challenging.
We are all accumulating devices that can be used in different situations: a desktop in the office, a laptop when traveling, a tablet at the coffee shop, and a smartphone any time, anywhere. And users are now expecting their favorite apps to work in each of these situations. How are software vendors responding to this challenge?
Companies such as Microsoft, Omni Group, and Adobe have produced innovative solutions, carefully designed for each specific platform, using cloud file sharing for storing and retrieving data among apps. Not only has data storage migrated to cloud storage, but this multiplatform usage trend also has encouraged different ways to enforce software licensing.
Omkar Munipalle’s article on software monetization introduces the changing dynamics of software licenses, and Steve Cholerton asserts that the risk of outright piracy has resulted in software vendors creating restrictive and confusing licensing enforcement.
Many of us rely on software for both business and pleasure, and the hassle of dealing with restrictive license management techniques appears to be anticustomer. These articles should give you some ideas to innovate how your software products provide licensing protection against unauthorized users—without punishing your real customers.
Migrating project teams using traditional project management techniques to agile is easier said than done. In the cover article, Chasing Mavericks, Scott Frost suggests a four-step approach using rolling-wave planning to accomplish this.
And for those of you in organizations that think merging unlike methodologies—like waterfall and Scrum—can achieve the best of both worlds, think again. You’ll definitely want to heed the lessons Steve Zachary presents in his article Waterfall Sprints.
