UNIT 8. GLOBALISATION

I. Read the texts and comment on their contents.

GLOBALISATION

Globalization is something than we can’t see but we can feel the effects of it. It’s a process of interaction among the people, companies and governments of different countries. We can feel globalization almost everywhere nowadays. People eat American fast-food, wear Italian shoes and Mexican shirts, drive Japanese cars and listen to Korean music. Generally speaking, globalization is a blend of cultures. Some people think that it’s a new process. In fact, globalization existed even during Middle Ages, when people decided totrade goods with merchants from distant countries. Since 1980, it has begun to move at a faster pace. Today globalization is at its peak. There are, of course, some advantages and disadvantages of this process.

The best thing is that people can buy and sell whatever they want from every corner of our planet. Internet has made it easier. People enjoy the variety of choice and prices. Globalization also gives an opportunity to learn more about culture of other nations. Countries focus on what they can do better instead of making bad-quality products. For example, Belgium is good at agriculture and producing fine chocolate but it doesn’t produce cars. Thus, they can buy cars from Germany or France. Another advantage of globalization is the growth of international companies. They can open affiliates in different countries and create additional workplace for local people.

The first issue on the list of disadvantages that globalization has brought is the pollution of the environment. The building of new harmful factories has resulted into considerable environmental problems. Another disadvantage is the fact that globalization gradually destroys cultural identity. It’s especially obvious when European people try to impose their traditions and customs on Asian nations. And last but not the least: domestic producers also suffer. They find it difficult to sell their produce when people buy everything on international market.

VOCABULARY ITEMS

a process of interaction – процесс взаимодействия

fast-food – быстрое питание

generally speaking – говоря в общем

blend – смесь

advantages –преимущества

disadvantages –недостатки

a variety of choice – разнообразие выбора

to give an opportunity – дать возможность

bad-quality products –продукты низкого качества

to affiliate – присоединять

to create additional workplace – создавать дополнительные рабочие места

issue –выпуск

harmful factories – фабрики / заводы, несущие вред

to destroy – разрушать

obvious – очевидный

to impose – навязывать

domestic producers – отечественный производитель

CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION

Continuous integration (CI) is the practice, in software engineering, of merging all developer working copies with a shared mainline several times a day. It was first named and proposed by Grady Booch in his method, who did not advocate integrating several times a day. It was adopted as part of extreme programming (XP), which did advocate multiple integrations a day, perhaps as many as tens a day. The main aim of CI is to prevent integration problems, referred to as "integration hell" in early descriptions of XP. CI isn't universally accepted as an improvement over frequent integration, so it is important to distinguish between the two as there is disagreement about the virtues of each.

CI was originally intended to be used in combination with automated unit tests written through the practices of test-driven development. Initially this was conceived of as running all unit tests in the developer's local environment and verifying they all passed before committing to the mainline. This helps avoid one developer's work in progress breaking another developer's copy. If necessary, partially complete features can be disabled before committing using feature toggles.

Later elaborations of the concept introduced build servers, which automatically run the unit tests periodically or even after every commit and report the results to the developers. The use of build servers (not necessarily running unit tests) had already been practised by some teams outside the XP community. Nowadays, many organizations have adopted CI without adopting all of XP.

In addition to automated unit tests, organizations using CI typically use a build server to implement continuous processes of applying quality control in general — small pieces of effort, applied frequently. In addition to running the unit and integration tests, such processes run additional static and dynamic tests, measure and profile performance, extract and format documentation from the source code and facilitate manual QA processes. This continuous application of quality control aims to improve the quality of software, and to reduce the time taken to deliver it, by replacing the traditional practice of applying quality control after completing all development. This is very similar to the original idea of integrating more frequently to make integration easier, only applied to QA processes.

In the same vein the practice of continuous delivery further extends CI by making sure the software checked in on the mainline is always in a state that can be deployed to users and makes the actual deployment process very rapid.

VOCABULARY ITEMS

software engineering – программирование

to advocate –подчёркивать значение

to adopt – принять, усыновить

aim – цель

an improvement – усовершенствование

virtues – моральные принципы

to avoid initially –избегать на ранней стадии

feature toggles –специфические механизмы

elaboration – тщательная разработка

team – команда

quality control – контроль качества

additional –дополнительный

software – программное обеспечение

to complete –заканчивать

frequently –часто

vein –склонность

II. Exercises

a. Answer the questions.

1. What is the globalization?

2. When did the globalization appear?

3. What are advantages and disadvantages of the process of globalization? Give examples from the text.

4. What is the continuous integration?

5. What was the essence of the method proposed by Grady Booch?

6. What was the original intention of CI?

b. Translate the phrases into English

- непрерывная интеграция

- разработки программного обеспечения

- экстремальное программирование

- развитие в тестовом режиме

- контроль качества

- качество программного обеспечения

c. Translate the sentences into English

1. Глобализация – это процесс взаимодействия людей, компаний и правительств разных стран. 2. Глобализация существовала еще в эпоху средневековья, когда люди решили обмениваться товаром с купцами из далеких стран. 3. У этого процесса есть, конечно, свои преимущества и недостатки: самое лучшее это то, что люди могут покупать и продавать все, что хотят, со всех уголков нашей планеты. 4. Глобализация также дает возможность узнать больше о культуре других народов. 5. Еще одно преимущество глобализации это рост международных компаний: они могут открывать филиалы в разных странах и создавать дополнительные рабочие места для местного населения. 6. Самым главным недостатком процесса глобализации – это загрязнение окружающей среды. 7. Строительство новых вредных заводов привело к значительным экологическим проблемам. 8. Еще одним недостатком является тот факт, что глобализация постепенно разрушает культурную идентичность, это особенно заметно, когда европейцы пытаются навязать свои традиции и обычаи азиатским нациям. 9. Отечественным производителям стало сложно продавать свою продукцию, т.к. появилась возможность заменить ее европейскими товарами.10. Практика разработки программного обеспечения заключается в выполнении частых автоматизированных сборок проекта для скорейшего выявления и решения интеграционных проблем. 11. В обычном проекте, где над разными частями системы разработчики трудятся независимо, стадия интеграции является заключительной. 12. Может непредсказуемо задержать окончание работ. 13. Переход к непрерывной интеграции позволяет снизить трудоёмкость интеграции и сделать её более предсказуемой за счет наиболее раннего обнаружения и устранения ошибок и противоречий. 14. Непрерывная интеграция является одним из основных приёмов экстремального программирования.

d. Find the Russian equivalents for words and word combinations in bold and make up as many sentences with them as you can.

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