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July 5, 2006

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Welcome to the July 5, 2006 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.

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UT Prof Gets Computer Science Award
Daily Texan (06/30/06) Powell, Matt

ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH) has named University of Texas computer science associate professor Doug Burger as its 2006 Maurice Wilkes Award winner. Burger won the annual award, which began in 1998, for his work in spatially distributed processors and memory-system architecture. Burger's work is designed to expand the processing of messages beyond current physical limitations of processors. The award is given to computing achievements by those working in the field for less than 20 years. "There are so many quality people working in this field. I really wasn't expecting it at all," says Burger, the co-leader of UT's "Tera-op, Reliable, Intelligently Adaptive Processing System" project, which is developing new microprocessors in conjunction with IBM that it says could "revolutionize computing." Burger, 37, is the youngest person ever to win this award. For more information about the Maurice Wilkes Award, visit http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigarch/wilkes/wilkes.html
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A Search Engine That's Becoming an Inventor
New York Times (07/03/06) P. C1; Hansell, Saul; Markoff, John

Though it has vaulted from the confines of a Silicon Valley garage to an established member of the Fortune 500 with $9 billion in cash, Google stubbornly clings to the culture of innovation that began with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin building their own networked computers out of cheap PC parts. As graduate students, money was tight, but Page and Brin also felt they could create a more efficient search tool with their own networked computers than with commercial offerings. That climate of innovation persists, as Google still primarily relies on custom-made servers. Google is also using software developed by its own sophisticated tools to power the computers in its growing string of data centers around the world, such as the vast new site in The Dalles, Ore., where technologies have been customized for energy efficiency. There are some indications that Google is even preparing to develop its own microchips. Google might be the world's fourth-largest manufacturer of computer servers, behind Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, by the estimates of Gartner's Martin Reynolds. Microsoft and Yahoo!, Google's chief rivals, both develop much of their own infrastructure software, though they buy the bulk of their equipment from established manufacturers. "At some point you have to ask yourself what is your core business," said Yahoo!'s Kevin Timmons. "Are your going to design your own router, or are you going to build the world's most popular Web site? It is very difficult to do both." Google is trying to do both, and claims that, as a result, its computing costs are well below those of its rivals. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates acknowledges Google's pool of talented computer scientists, though he downplays the efficacy of home-brewed hardware. One of Google's patents covers a series of software applications for massive parallel computing. Part of Google's innovation mitigates the problem of hardware unreliability, as its software redirects tasks to other components when one device fails.
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Getting Machines to Think Like Us
CNet (07/03/06) Skillings, Jonathan

With a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of a Dartmouth College conference on artificial intelligence scheduled later this month, Stanford University professor John McCarthy, who is credited with originally coining the term "artificial intelligence" in advance of the 1956 conference, shared his thoughts in a recent interview on the origins and development of the field. Fifty years ago, the notion that computers would be the primary instrument to conduct artificial intelligence was a minority opinion, McCarthy said. Computers are much more skillful at playing chess than they are at playing Go, according to McCarthy, who notes that comparable effort has been put into programming them for each task, indicating computers still have difficulty evaluating positions and situations and identifying parts. One of the major advances in artificial intelligence has been computers' ability to reason nonmonotonically, inferring a conclusion from a qualified statement. McCarthy also notes the success of the team of Stanford researchers who won last year's DARPA Grand Challenge, sending an unmanned robotic car on a race 131.6 miles across the Mojave Desert. In the future, McCarthy looks for machines to exhibit more commonsense reasoning and knowledge, and to have a sense of originality programmed into them. Machine capability is no longer the impediment to artificial intelligence, McCarthy says, claiming that the continued evolution of the field will of necessity be a product of basic ideas. McCarthy is dismissive of futurist Ray Kurzweil's notion of the "singularity"--the literal convergence of man and machine. Describing the singularity as "nonsense," McCarthy predicts that the next major advance in machine intelligence will come from a younger generation of scientists.
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Hacker Attacks Hitting Pentagon
Baltimore Sun (07/02/06) P. A1; Gorman, Siobhan

While the reported number of attempts to breach the Pentagon's computer networks has spiked from fewer than 800 in 1996 to more than 160,000 last year, the government's efforts to shore up its cybersecurity defenses have stalled. An initiative undertaken by the National Security Agency to encrypt sensitive information and restrict access at the Defense Department and other government bodies is seven years behind schedule, due partially to fundamental differences between the two agencies. According to an internal NSA report, 30 percent of the agency's security equipment provides insufficient protection, and 46 percent of the equipment is nearing that status. "Much of the existing cryptographic equipment is based on ... technologies that are 20-30-plus years old," according to the report, which also noted the sharp increase in the sophistication of cyber criminals. A security team spent weeks addressing a recent incident where Chinese hackers gained access to a computer system that serves the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to two sources close to the incident. "This stuff is enormously important," said John Stenbit, who served as the Pentagon's CIO until 2004. "If the keys get into the wrong hands, all kinds of bad things happen. You don't want to just let a hacker grab the key as it's going through the Internet." The Pentagon reports that attacks against its computers have increased 200-fold in the past decade, citing growing threats from individuals, terrorist groups, and foreign states. In a recent court case, two men were charged in Miami with hacking into government computers and sending military secrets to China. Iran has also emerged as a major threat to the government's aging computer systems. The NSA is developing the Key Management Infrastructure program to strengthen the government's defenses, though it has been impeded by high costs and poor management.
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Securing Europe's Future Information Society
IST Results (07/05/06)

In an effort to combat the mounting security risks associated with Internet services and commerce, the EU has launched an effort to shore up the reliability of its networked systems. Drawing on Europe's leading security experts, the SecurIST project is formulating a roadmap for the continued improvement of network dependability and security throughout the continent. Security, which includes confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility of information, is closely related to dependability, which encompasses reliability, safety, and maintainability in the face of intentional and accidental threats. "The project should provide Europe with a clear European-level view of the strategic opportunities, strengths, weakness(es), and threats in the area of security and dependability," said Jim Clarke, coordinator of the SecurIST program. "It will identify priorities for Europe and mechanisms to effectively focus efforts on those priorities, identifying instruments for delivering on those priorities and a coherent time frame for delivery." The program created a security taskforce by dividing its focus into different linked areas such as security policy, application security, identity and privacy, and biometrics. An advisory board helped the more than 200 SecurIST researchers develop a series of recommendations, including enhancing the centralized control mechanisms and empowering individual users to guard against identity theft and other cyberthreats. The researchers have identified service oriented architecture as a key priority for secure software design, as well as the development of the broad disciplines that enable security: cryptology and trusted computing.
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Researchers Claim Great Firewall Workaround
IDG News Service (07/05/06) Lemon, Sumner; Gohring, Nancy

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have reported the discovery of a method for working around the Chinese government's complex Internet filtering system, though some question how much of a breakthrough their research really is. The filtering system uses routers and intrusion-detection applications to screen for keywords within packets of Internet transmissions. A request for Web sites that include prohibited words such as "falun" is blocked by sending reset (RST) packets to the client computer and the Web server, severing the connection between the two. The Great Firewall keeps the connection broken for a period of time that averages around 20 minutes, but can last up to an hour, a finding that some researchers say was already common knowledge to those familiar with the system. "There's nothing in there I didn't know two years ago," said Michael Robinson, an IT expert in Beijing. "The connection reset system described in the paper is only one layer of a much larger multilayer content control system. Using encrypted proxy servers is the only way around all of them." The researchers suggested special software that could ignore the RST packets as a potential workaround to the Great Firewall, though Robinson counters that creating a proxy connection involves the same amount of work and provides a more complete solution. Richard Clayton, one of the Cambridge researchers, counters that the link to proxies is generally unencrypted so that Internet traffic is still subject to censorship. Clayton hopes that software companies such as Microsoft will begin creating TCP/IP stacks that ignore the resets to increase security.
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A Petaflop Before Its Time?
HPC Wire (06/28/06)

In an interview at this week's ISC2006 conference in Dresden, Germany, Horst Simon, director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, discussed the challenges posed by petascale computing. Of the several varieties of petaflop performance, Simon believes that a peak petaflop and a Linpack petaflop could be attained as early as 2008, but true petascale computing is most likely eight to 10 years down the road. Simon is concerned that the HPC development community, which is currently enjoying ample government funding, could settle for "a petaflop before its time" by setting its sights on what he describes as easy goals, such as peak or Linpack performance. Simon argues that the real work lies beyond those benchmarks, and that researchers will have to devote themselves to developing a significant computing infrastructure before achieving sustained petaflop performance. Simon is also concerned about power consumption. For today's architectures to scale to the petaflop level, they would require an inordinate amount of power that few centers will be able to afford, posing a potential barrier to widespread adoption, particularly among universities. Simon estimates that by 2011, a sustained petaflop system could require around 20 megawatts, which, even by today's electricity prices, would cost around $12 million a year to power. New approaches to processor design could help resolve the power problem, though Simon notes that different processor curves are still a long way from being commercialized. Programming software to run on parallel architectures is also a challenge, which DARPA is working to overcome with new languages. Simon says the HPC community must adapt the system software, applications, and hardware in chorus so that supercomputing evolves as an ecosystem. Petaflop computing will be especially useful for climate modeling, though Simon is concerned about the viability of today's algorithms at such a large scale.
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Cool Light Leads to Greener Chips
BBC News (06/30/06)

A team of researchers from University College London has developed a technique that could result in inexpensive, environmentally friendly chips. Using cool ultraviolet lamps to fabricate silicon dioxide instead of the heat-intensive furnaces currently in use, the technique requires much less power. "This means that the industry's energy, and subsequent cost savings, could reduce the prices of electronic devices for consumers and, of course, create a positive environmental impact," said UCL professor Ian Boyd. As the number of transistors steadily increases in accordance with Moore's Law, chip manufacturers have been exploring techniques to keep temperatures down to prevent warping and distortion. Also, the heat that is created by denser chip designs can cause features to become fluid and bleed into each other. The new technique uses an ultraviolet lamp filled with argon gas that is charged with a high voltage. It emits light that breaks oxygen molecules down into individual atoms, a dissociation that produces one atom with a lot of energy and one with very little. The energetic atoms can oxidize silicon at room temperature, Boyd said. The most significant roadblock to the adoption of the technique in the commercial setting could be that it does not create a pure material, according to Douglas Paul of the University of Cambridge. "There have been many people who have shown similar results but all these techniques cannot be used for electronics because the defect densities are far too high," he said. Boyd acknowledges that sustained exposure to UV wavelengths causes defects, but he notes that his technique employs a light wavelength that has never before been used. Boyd says the technique could be used for applying circuits to materials such as cloth, paper, or plastic, in addition to microchips.
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Wariness of U.S. Tech Lag on the Rise
United Press International (06/26/06) Darm, Alecia

Integrating technology into every public institution is critical to the United States' competitiveness in the 21st century, according to experts speaking at a conference hosted by the New America Foundation on Capitol Hill. Technology education has the capacity to broaden access to information at virtually every national institution. "Acquiring the best technology for learning is not a problem but a challenge; it is an opportunity to excel," said Dexter Fletcher of the Institute for Defense Analyses. Technology education is particularly valuable because the computing experience is highly personal and interactive, according to Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists. Speakers also emphasized the value that technology education has for children, especially since the average child spends six hours each day using electronic media, according to Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future program at the New America Foundation. Lawmakers are working to pass the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO-IT), legislation that would support technology education through programs such as Immune Attack, an educational video game about human immunology. Digital Promise's Rayne Guilford likened the scope of the legislation to the GI Bill and the Northwest Ordinance. "Once a century, Congress makes a major investment in transforming training and education," Guilford said. "The Digital Promise is the 21st century equivalent of the GI Bill." The absence of a commercial market is a central impediment to the DO-IT initiative, though some private corporations are realizing that technology education is critical to preserving the United States' climate of innovation.
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IBM: Free the Net
ZDNet India (06/28/06) Yeo, Vivian

In Singapore for a ministerial forum on next-generation networks co-hosted with the Infocomm Media Business Exchange 2006, IBM director of Internet technology and strategy Michael Nelson warned that government regulation could stifle the Web's evolution, which he sees headed in three primary directions: Ubiquitous high-speed access, faster networks reaching 100 Mbps, and grid computing. "The Internet is much more like the computer industry, which has been very lightly regulated than the telephone industry, which has been very heavily regulated," said Nelson. "Because it has been very lightly regulated, innovators have been able to do new things to move in many different directions--directions which politicians and regulators couldn't possibly have anticipated." He notes that various organizations, including ICANN, IETF, and W3C all contribute to but don't dictate the Internet's direction, and argues that VoIP should not be "regulated the same way as traditional telephony." As to the future of the Internet, Nelson said, "we'll have networks that tie together much more powerful machines, and are able to do many different things." He envisions an Internet where all people, devices, and "even their dogs" are networked.
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Breaking Barriers and Bridging Divides
Explore Qatar (06/26/06)

Despite 40 years of predictions, technology has still had no substantive impact on education, according to Raj Reddy, a professor at the Mozah Bint Nasser University of Computer Science in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Reddy argues that technology's impact is still impeded by bandwidth and memory constraints, and that much of the existing technology is priced out of the reach of developing countries. The digital divide is "widening because technologies and solutions are not tailored to be used in villages or rural areas, or by different language groups. There is no attention being paid to their needs," Reddy said. Particularly in the Arab world, technological progress is slowed by a shortage of researchers, and the community approach to technology that characterizes the United States is also an important missing ingredient. Reddy is working on the Million Book Project, an endeavor led by Carnegie Mellon that aims to scan 1 million books by 2007. Reddy is also an advocate for the uneducated and illiterate, claiming that the least educated people in the world should have the most bandwidth, so that they could send voice files instead of emails, for instance. For the developing world, Reddy is promoting a device called the PCtvt that would combine the functions of a PC, TV, personal video recorder, IP phone, and Video with a simple, user-friendly interface. Reddy also notes the disproportionately low involvement of women in computer science, describing the initiative underway at Carnegie Mellon to give greater emphasis on the problem-solving concepts of the discipline rather than the programming side. Raj Reddy is the co-reciepient (with Edward Feigenbaum) of ACM's 1994 A.M. Turing Award; http://www.acm.org/awards/citations/reddy.html
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Wider Authority Urged for IT Managers
Federal Times (06/26/06) Vol. 42, No. 21, P. 8; Curl, Aimee

Security experts told lawmakers that Congress should give federal CIOs and chief information security officers (CISOs) more power to prevent more security breaches from occurring such as the one at the Veterans Affairs and Agriculture departments. They also said information officers at government agencies need to have more authority to guarantee compliance of data security guidelines. Eugene Spafford at Purdue University's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security said CIOs and CISOs need sufficient funding and a trained staff to perform an effective security plan. A laptop containing the personal information of 26.5 million veterans was stolen from a VA employee's home last month and the Agriculture Department's computer systems, which stored 26,000 current and former employees' information, was recently hacked. Spafford, along with former VA CISO Bruce Brody, told the committee there is a need for someone else besides the VA to enforce privacy polices. Brody testified before the House Veterans Affairs Committee with other experts on June 22. "We've found that individual directors often feel they can override policy when it gets in their way," said Spafford. "Unfortunately, the people making these decisions don't have the training to understand the consequences." Eugene Spafford is chair of ACM's U.S. Public Policy Committee; http://www.acm.org/usacm
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New Research Center to Combat Identity Theft
TechNewsWorld (06/29/06) Morphy, Erika

A new group called the Center for Identity Management and Information Protection has been formed to fight identity theft and data losses that have occurred at colleges, in the private sector, and the government. The group will be based at Utica College in New York and will focus on how to prevent and detect identity fraud and theft, how to spot cybercriminals, how to improve identity authentication systems, and how technology can protect and share information. Experts agree that establishing the Center is a step in the right direction. "Most of the incidents of identity theft lately, at least anecdotally, have been cases of employees taking home laptops with sensitive information on them that were subsequently stolen," says Ron O'Brien, senior security consultant at Sophos. The Center will be led by Gary R. Gordon, a professor at Utica College, while the board of advisors of the college's Economic Crime Institute will oversee the Center's research. In addition to Utica College, the Center was founded by LexisNexis, IBM, the United States Secret Service, the FBI, Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute's CERT/CC, Indiana University's Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, and Syracuse University's CASE Center. The Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, and Utica College's CIMIP will team up for the Center's first project, which will look at existing and upcoming criminal identity theft groups.
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A Culture of 'No'
InformationWeek (06/26/06)No. 1095, P. 23; Claburn, Thomas; Whiting, Rick; Malykhina, Elena

IT professionals must take a paternal, security-minded view toward employees' take-up of popular, often free consumer-oriented Web tools, but not at the expense of innovation, which is essential to companies' ability to rapidly adapt to change. There is a growing paranoia about security among business technologists in light of much publicized system intrusions, vulnerabilities, and advisories about shady employee conduct. However, "if [IT teams] put policies in place and make it so that people go around them, they end up opening up bigger security holes," warns Gartner VP David Smith. One strategy to help ensure continued innovation while giving employees sufficient maneuverability is for companies to collaborate with vendors to make popular applications secure. Cox New England's Brad Shipp recommends that companies try to understand the value of rogue apps, which obviously fulfill some need beyond the capabilities of IT; "They're all red flags, but they're also opportunities for doing something better," he maintains. Google Enterprise general manager Dave Girouard said at the recent MIT Sloan CIO Symposium that companies must broaden their menu of options in order to maximize the productivity of innovative workers. ProBusiness Services network engineer Bob Pierce does not endorse unconditional employee usage of rogue apps, suggesting that imported items should be subjected to security checks, while any output from the unauthorized software must exhibit compatibility with corporate software standards. "Does IT Matter?" author Nicholas Carr believes workplace-based consumer technology will trigger an increase in internal IT needs in the short term because data control and integration across Web applications requires on-staff expertise, but he predicts that most corporate IT positions will be phased out over the next 10 years.
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E-Paper Chase Nears the Finish Line
Electronic Design (06/22/06) Vol. 54, No. 13, P. 47; Allan, Roger

Electronic ink and paper are approaching readiness for mainstream penetration, as indicated by prototypes, demos, and new products. E-ink displays usually involve black and white microcapsules suspended in a transparent fluid that line up in different orientations and patterns in response to electrical charges, forming on-screen text. Forthcoming products include the Sony Reader electronic book, a lightweight display that uses electronic ink from E-Ink, and has 64 MB of internal flash memory in which to store hundreds of books. E-paper can be applied to more than just e-books: ISuppi expects magnetic cards and electronic shelf labels to be the No. 1 and No. 2 applications, respectively, for flexible displays by 2013. Actual products on the market are being outnumbered by public demonstrations of e-ink and e-paper technologies, such as Toppan Printing's wall-sized electronic newspaper of nearly 300 individual e-paper tiles, which constitutes the world's biggest newspaper display. Also generating interest are collaborative projects to develop e-ink, e-paper, and flexible displays, such as the joint E-Ink and Ambient Devices venture to develop the Weather Wizard, a household device that wirelessly displays five-day local weather forecasts in real time. Currently being researched to meet future flexible display requirements are nano-engineered materials.
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Robots Are Our Friends
New Scientist (06/24/06) Vol. 190, No. 2557, P. 56; Richardson, Kathleen

The trend to create robots humans can relate to as companions or caregivers is gaining momentum as industrial and academic roboticists strive to create humanoid machines, writes University of Cambridge social anthropologist Kathleen Richardson. She notes that advances in humanoid robot technology are accompanied by changing perceptions of what defines a human being as well as the similarities and differences between machines and people. "It seems the meaning of human-robot encounters has less to do with what the robot can do and more to do with what the human is doing, prepared to do or prepared to imagine is occurring in the encounter," notes Richardson. This in turn is feeding into the growing emotional attachment some people feel for robotic toys such as Sony's Aibo dog or the Tamagotchi virtual pet. Richardson observes "a growing misanthropic attitude" in human culture that encourages anthropomorphism of machines and increases the possibility that humans might start having deep relationships with robots. A further indication that people think a human-like robot-human relationship is feasible is the emerging interest in robot ethics as machines assume more human qualities.
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Moore's Law Meets Its Match
IEEE Spectrum (06/06) Vol. 43, No. 6, P. 44; Tummala, Rao R.

The Georgia Institute of Technology's Microsystems Packaging Research Center is focused on devising system-on-package (SOP) solutions that could yield small megaelectronic devices by eliminating the 90 percent of passive components comprising current systems. Rao R. Tummala, the research center's founding director, writes that SOP technology can miniaturize components and make circuit boards almost disappear, effecting an increase in system functions that is proportional to the expected doubling of component density every year or so, and that far overtakes the increase in transistor density dictated by Moore's Law. In a SOP approach, passive components are integrated into micrometers-thick thin-film elements that are incorporated into a multilayered system package. An SOP is much less power-consumptive because its smaller size enables faster chip-to-chip transmissions at lower currents and voltages, while design, fabrication, and time-to-market cycles are shortened because there is no reliance on a single technology and separate chips are employed for different functions. For SOP to achieve mainstream success, several developments must occur: Tools for the concurrent design of digital, analog, and optical circuits must be devised along with the package; the manufacturing approach must transition to an integrated design/fabrication/packaging model; and processing technologies must be able to combine cheap, large-area board processes with thin-film processes and clean-room processes to produce SOP substrates. "At Georgia Tech we believe that the market for multifunctional products and the advantages of designing chips and system packages concurrently are so compelling that companies will just have to design and fabricate everything together," comments Tummala. "And as the SOP concept takes off, design-tool and fabrication houses will turn their attention to developing powerful programs for concurrent design and advanced manufacturing."
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Bring Order to Your Project With Scrum
Software Test & Performance (06/06) Vol. 3, No. 6, P. 12; Galen, Bob

Software team productivity can be enhanced with the Scrum agile methodology for project management, writes RGCG founder Bob Galen. He explains that Scrum concentrates on an agile project's planning, execution, monitoring, and collaborative facets rather than suggesting specific development practices. The methodology starts with a product backlog of prioritized features to deploy within a project, and from this is extracted a "sprint" backlog that the team will focus on for a 30-day period or sprint, during which they will reach consensus on a focused theme and the contents to be completed to fulfill the goal. The entire team meets on a daily basis, where each member answers basic status and issue tracking questions; then real-time feedback is provided by the team leader and via burndown charts that show ongoing progress from multiple viewpoints. At the end of each sprint is a sprint review period where demonstrable artifacts are presented and where practice and process adjustments can be recommended for the next sprint. Galen explains that Scrum teams initially feature a tester who helps to plan the testing effort for each backlog component and as each sprint backlog is devised; "Whether fair or not, testers need to integrate in Scrum teams as a development partner first and show how they can impact the sprint deliverables and contribute to the overall goals of each sprint," the author writes. Galen has wrapped Scrum around traditional testing teams and initiatives, and observes that the methodology can be leveraged with only a few key tweaks: The testing backlog emphasizes testing activities that are prioritized according to time and the volume of testing that will result, while sprint duration must be modified to calibrate with testing type as well as cycle time. Daily Scrum planning and tracking meetings continue to have relevance in this setup, while feedback always yields adjustments and lessons to be applied to the next sprint.
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