Software Engineering

Mostly posts relating to software design and architecture.

Runtime Metric Meets Developer – Building Better Cloud Applications Using Feedback

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Runtime Metric Meets Developer - Building Better Cloud Applications Using Feedback - Cito et al. 2015 Today's paper choice is also from OOPSLA. It describes some early work around an interesting idea... A unifying theme of many ongoing trends in software engineering is a blurring of the boundaries between building and operating software products. In ... Continue Reading

Optimization Coaching for JavaScript

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments
Optimization Coaching for JavaScript - St-Amour & Guo, 2015 Because modern programming languages heavily rely on compiler optimizations for performance, failure to apply certain key optimizations is often the source of performance issues. To diagnose these performance issues, programmers need insight about what happens during the optimization process. Consider the following program snippet from the ... Continue Reading

Helping Developers Help Themselves: Automatic Decomposition of Code Review Changes

~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment
Helping Developers Help Themselves: Automatic Decomposition of Code Review Changes - Barnett et al. 2015 Earlier this week we saw that pull requests with well organised commits are strongly preferred by integrators. Unfortunately, developers often make changes that incorporate multiple bug fixes, feature additions, refactorings, etc.. These result in changes that are both large and ... Continue Reading

Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-Based Development

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-based Development - Gousios et al. 2015 In the recent years, we are witnessing that collaborative, lightweight code review is increasingly becoming the default mechanism for integrating changes, in both collocated and distributed development. Effectively, the pull request (in various forms) is becoming the atomic unit of software change. How ... Continue Reading

Scalability! But at what COST?

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 15 Comments
Scalability! But at what COST? - McSherry et al. 2015 With thanks to Felix Cuadrado, @felixcuadrado, for pointing this paper out to me via twitter. Scalability is highly prized, yet it can be a misleading metric when studied in isolation. McSherry et al. study the COST of distributed systems: the Configuration that Outperforms a Single ... Continue Reading