Software Engineering

Mostly posts relating to software design and architecture.

From Aristotle to Ringelmann

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 11 Comments
From Aristotle to Ringelmann: A large-scale analysis of team productivity and coordination in open-source software projects - Scholtes et al. ICSE 2016 A slightly different flavour of papers this week as we dip into the ICSE 2016 conference proceedings. We kick things off with a study looking at the effect of development team size on ... Continue Reading

Not-quite-so-broken TLS: lessons in re-engineering a security protocol specification and implementation

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments
Not-quite-so-broken TLS: lessons in re-engineering a security protocol specification and implementation - Kaloper-Meršinjak et al. 2015 Update: fixed broken paper link above. On the surface this is a paper about a TLS implementation, but the really interesting story to me is the attempt to 'do it right,' and the techniques and considerations involved in that ... Continue Reading

Experience with Rules-Based Programming for Distributed Concurrent Fault-Tolerant Code

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments
Experience with Rules-Based Programming for Distributed, Concurrent, Fault-Tolerant Code - Stutsman et al. 2015 As we saw in yesterday's paper, the authors of RAMCloud settled on a very effective design pattern for writing distributed, concurrent, fault-tolerant (DCFT) modules within their system. They call this pattern 'rules-based programming' - a collection of (condition,action) pairs that can ... Continue Reading

Reactive Vega: A Streaming Dataflow Architecture for Declarative Interactive Visualization

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
Reactive Vega: A Streaming Dataflow Architecture for Declarative Interactive Visualization - Satyanarayan et al. 2015 Today's paper choice combines Event-driven FRP (E-FRP) with dataflow and stream management techniques from the database community to implement declarative interactive visualisations on top of the existing Vega declarative visualisation grammar and supporting runtime. As a good example of what's ... Continue Reading

We Have a DREAM: Distributed Reactive Programming with Consistency Guarantees

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
We Have a DREAM: Distributed Reactive Programming with Consistency Guarantees - Magara & Salvaneschi 2014 Earlier this week we saw in "A Survey on Reactive Programming" that (at least as of 2012) distributing reactive programs remained an active research challenge. Today's paper choice takes on that challenge and examines some consistency models for distributed reactive ... Continue Reading

Functional Reactive Animation

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments
Functional Reactive Animation - Elliott & Hudak 1997 This is the paper widely acknowledged to have given birth to (Functional) Reactive Programming or FRP. The challenge that Elliott and Hudak faced was to provide an elegant and expressive way to specify animations without resorting to tedious frame-by-frame constructions. A key insight is that animations are ... Continue Reading