Software Engineering

Mostly posts relating to software design and architecture.

Three key checklists and remedies for trustworthy analysis of online controlled experiments at scale

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments
Three key checklists and remedies for trustworthy analysis of online controlled experiments at scale Fabijan et al., ICSE 2019 Last time out we looked at machine learning at Microsoft, where we learned among other things that using an online controlled experiment (OCE) approach to rolling out changes to ML-centric software is important. Prior to that ... Continue Reading

Automating chaos experiments in production

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Automating chaos experiments in production Basiri et al., ICSE 2019 Are you ready to take your system assurance programme to the next level? This is a fascinating paper from members of Netflix’s Resilience Engineering team describing their chaos engineering initiatives: automated controlled experiments designed to verify hypotheses about how the system should behave under gray ... Continue Reading

Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments
Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking Michael et al., EuroSys'19 On the surface you might think today’s paper selection an odd pick. It describes the labs environment, DSLabs, developed at the University of Washington to accompany a course in distributed systems. During the ten week course, students implement four different assignments: an exactly-once ... Continue Reading

How not to structure your database-backed web applications: a study of performance bugs in the wild

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 27 Comments
How not to structure your database-backed web applications: a study of performance bugs in the wild Yang et al., ICSE'18 This is a fascinating study of the problems people get into when using ORMs to handle persistence concerns in their web applications. The authors study real-world applications and distil a catalogue of common performance anti-patterns. ... Continue Reading

Deep code search

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 15 Comments
Deep code search Gu et al., ICSE'18 The problem with searching for code is that the query, e.g. "read an object from xml," doesn’t look very much like the source code snippets that are the intended results, e.g.: * That’s why we have Stack Overflow! Stack Overflow can help with ‘how to’ style queries, but ... Continue Reading

Automated localization for unreproducible builds

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
Automated localization for unreproducible builds Ren et al., ICSE'18 Reproducible builds are an important component of integrity in the software supply chain. Attacks against package repositories and build environments may compromise binaries and produce packages with backdoors (see this report for a recent prominent example of compromised packages on DockerHub). If the same source files ... Continue Reading