Software Engineering Radio

Recording Venue: University of Passau

Guest: Sven Apel

Host: Stefan

In this first episode on Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD), Sven Apel explains why developing software in a feature-oriented manner is so vital for us as software engineers and why objects are simply not enough.

Having stated that, Sven provides some clarifying answers to some key questions: What is a feature? What are feature models and feature modules? What is the infamous “feature interaction problem”?  And how come that we often struggle with the so-called “optional feature problem”?

Based on this common understanding, we then discuss the history of FOSD as a movement in software engineering research and a generative programming approach, its relationship to software product lines, and selected software landmarks (e.g. AHEAD). Finally, Sven sketches out the structure of an feature-oriented development process and comments on the relationship between FOSD and process management approaches such as Feature-Driven Design (FDD) and feature teams.

Links:

• Sven’s web site
• An overview article on FOSD
• The FOSD community portal

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Recording Venue: MongoSF 2010
Guest(s): Dwight Merriman

Host(s): Robert
Dwight Merriman talks with Robert about the emerging NoSQL movement, the three types of non-relational data stores, Brewer’s CAP theorem, the weaker consistency guarantees that can be made in a distributed database, document-oriented data stores, the data storage needs of modern web applications, and the open source MongoDB.

Links:

• 10-gen
• NoSQL – the Shift to a Non-Relational World by Dwight Merriman
• A series of blog posts on consistency in a distributed database (see entries from March 26 to April 15, 2010)
• Slides and video from MongoSF 2010
• NoSQL hub
• NoSQL mailing list on Google
• Follow Dwight Merriman on twitter
• 10-gen’s blog
• Brewer’s presentation on the CAP theorem
• MongoDB

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Recording Venue: QCon
Guest(s): Jay Kreps

Host(s): Robert
Jay Kreps talks about the open source data store Project Voldemort. Voldemort is a distributed key-value store used by LinkedIn and other high-traffic web sites to overcome the inherent scalability limitations of a relational database. The conversation delves into the workings of a Voldemort cluster, the type of consistency guarantees that can be made in a distributed database, and the tradeoff between client and the server.

Links:

• Project Voldemort
• Jay Kreps presentation at QCon San Francisco 2009
• Google mailing list for Project Voldemort
• Project Voldmort on github
• LinkedIn blog entry on Project Voldemort
• Amazon’s paper on Dynamo
• NoSQL hub
• Google mailing list for NoSQL

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