A dissection of the test-driven development process: does it really matter to test-first or to test-last? Fucci et al., ICSE'17 Here we have a study with a really interesting aim - to find out which aspects of TDD are most significant when it comes to developer productivity and code quality. What we'd really love to … Continue reading A dissection of the test-driven development process: does it really matter to test-first or test-last?
Author: adriancolyer
Venture Partner with Accel in London, author of 'The Morning Paper'
Decoding the representation of code in the brain: an fMRI study of code review and expertise
Decoding the representation of code in the brain: an fMRI study of code review and expertise Floyd et al., ICSE'17 fMRI studies have been used to explore how our brains encode expertise in physical tasks involving specialised motor skills (for example, playing golf), in memory development (for example, London taxi drivers), and in mental skills … Continue reading Decoding the representation of code in the brain: an fMRI study of code review and expertise
Node.fz: fuzzing the server-side event-driven architecture
Node.fz: Fuzzing the server-side event-driven architecture Davis et al., EuroSys'17 This paper provides a fascinating look at common causes of concurrency bugs in server-side event driven architecture (EDA) based applications. By far the most popular framework supporting this style is Node.js of course. The Node.js package ecosystem, npm, is the largest ever, with over 400,000 … Continue reading Node.fz: fuzzing the server-side event-driven architecture
SyncPerf: Categorizing, detecting, and diagnosing synchronization performance bugs
SyncPerf: Categorizing, detecting, and diagnosing synchronization performance bugs Mejbah ul Alam et al., EuroSys'17 This paper is an investigation into the causes of synchronisation-related performance issues in concurrent systems, together with a pair of tools that can help to detect and diagnose them. The main SyncPerf detection tool is very lightweight (average overhead 2.3%). It … Continue reading SyncPerf: Categorizing, detecting, and diagnosing synchronization performance bugs
RFP: When RPC is faster than server-bypass with RDMA
RFP: When RPC is faster than server-bypass with RDMA Su et al., EuroSys'17 Every system that works with RDMA faces a choice of how best to use it: IP emulation mode, two-sided request-reply calls (RPC), one-sided calls, or even dropping down to the datagram level. We've seen a number of papers weighing in on this … Continue reading RFP: When RPC is faster than server-bypass with RDMA
SGXBounds: memory safety for shielded execution
SGXBounds: memory safety for shielded execution Kuvaiskii et al., EuroSys'17 We've previously looked at a number of Intel SGX-related papers in The Morning Paper, including SCONE, which today's paper builds on. SGX comes with a memory encryption engine and seeks to protect trusted applications from an untrusted operating system, providing confidentiality and integrity guarantees. SGX, … Continue reading SGXBounds: memory safety for shielded execution
Hybrids on Steroids: SGX-based high-performance BFT
Hybrids on Steroids: SGX-based high performance BFT Behl et al., EuroSys'17 Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is the kind of fault-tolerance designed to withstand not just process crashes and network problems, but also active adversaries trying to break the system, as well as storage and memory corruptions and so on. We've taken a look at BFT … Continue reading Hybrids on Steroids: SGX-based high-performance BFT
Statistical analysis of latency through semantic profiling
Statistical analysis of latency through semantic profiling Huang et al., EuroSys'17 Unlike traditional application profilers that seek to show the 'hottest' functions where an application spends the most time, VProfiler shows you where the sources of variance in latency come from, tied to semantic intervals such as individual requests or transactions. ... an increasing number … Continue reading Statistical analysis of latency through semantic profiling
DStress: Efficient differentially private computations on distributed data
DStress: Efficient differentially private computations on distributed data Papadimitriou et al., EuroSys'17 Regulators would like to assess and manage the systemic risk in the banking system - for example, the likelihood that a few initial bankruptcies could cause a failure cascade. In theory, it would be possible to quantify the risk of such a cascading … Continue reading DStress: Efficient differentially private computations on distributed data
Online reconstruction of structural information from datacenter logs
Online reconstruction of structural information from datacenter logs Chothia et al., EuroSys'17 Today's choice brings together a couple of themes that we've previously looked at on The Morning Paper: recovering system information from log files, and dataflows for stream processing. On log files (and tracing), see for example Dapper, the MysteryMachine, lprof, and Pivot tracing. … Continue reading Online reconstruction of structural information from datacenter logs
the morning paper 