Software Engineering Radio

Recording Venue: OOPSLA 2007
Guest(s): Erich Gamma

Host(s): Markus
This episode is a conversation with Erich Gamma. We covered the four things he is known for in chronological order. We started with design patterns and the Gang-of-Four book of which he is the lead author. We then looked at JUnit, the testing framework he coauthored with Kent Beck and how it introduced unit testing to the masses. The next topic is obviously Eclipse, where Erich and his lab in Zürich is responsible for the Java Development Tooling. We also briefly discussed The Eclipse Way, the (obviously) successful process the Eclipse team uses for developing Eclipse itself. Finally, we’re looking at Erich’s current endeavour, the Jazz project. Jazz is a technology for collaborative software development.

Links:

• The JUnit project’s home page
• The Gang-Of-Four Book: Design Patterns
• The eclipse community site
• The Jazz project’s community site

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Recording Venue: OOP 2007
Guest(s): Charles Weir
James Noble

Host(s): Markus
In this Episode we’re discussing patterns for small memory software with the authors of the like-named book Charles Weir and James Noble. We look at various aspects of the small memory problem: How can you manage memory use across a whole system? What can you do when you have run out of primary storage? How can you fit a quart of data into a pint pot of memory? How can you reduce the memory needed for your data? How do you allocate memory to store your data structures? Answers to all those questions are provided in this Episode, and of course in their book.

Links:

• Symbian Developer Homepage
• SonyEricsson Developer Homepage
• Windows Mobile Developer Homepage
• Book: Garbage Collection and Memory Management
• Book Homepage
• Book at Amazon
• Penrillian – Charles’ company

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Robert S. Hanmer

Host(s): Markus
This is the second part of the discussion on fault tolerance with Bob Hanmer (if you didn’t listen to Episode 77, which contains part one, please go back and listen now; this episode builds on that previous one!)

We start by discussing a set of error detection patterns. Among are the well-known approaches such as checksums and voting. We then look at error recovery patterns, including restart, rollback or roll forward. The next section looks
at error mitigation patterns, which include shedding load and doing fresh work before stale. The last patterns section then looks at fault treatment patterns.

We conclude the episode with a small discussion about how to design systems using (these and other) patterns, and with some thoughts on why actually wrote the book.

Links:

• “Dependability and Its Threats: A Taxonomy” by Algirdas Avizienis, Jean-Claude Laprie and Brian Randell
• A NASA tutorial on Software Fault Tolerance
• Book Bob’s Book at Amazon
• Telecom I/O Patterns
• Bob’s Book at Wiley
• “Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience” by James E. Tomayko

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Recording Venue: OOPSLA 2007
Guest(s): Ralph Johnson
James Noble
Host(s): Markus
Recording Venue: OOPSLA 2007
Guest(s): Ralph Johnson
James Noble
Host(s): Markus
In this special Episode we briefly discuss the upcoming Patterns Journal with the two editors, Ralph Johnson and James Noble.

Links:

• The Hillside Group
• Patterns Journal Website

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Bruce Powel
Douglass

Host(s): Markus
This episode is a conversation with Bruce Powel Douglass on real time systems. We started by discussing what real time software is, and explored the difference between hard and soft real time. We then looked at different scheduling strategies, and the meaning of terms like urgency and importance in the context of scheduling. Next was a discussion of typical architectural styles for real time systems and how architectures are described in this context. This led us to a discussion about the importance of modeling, formalisms and languages as well as the role of automatic code generation from those models. We then looked at how to model QoS aspects and the role of SysML for modeling real time systems. We then had a brief look at which programming languages are used these days for real time systems and the role of static analysis to determine various properties of those programs in advance. The last part of the discussion focused on some best practices for building real time systems, the challenges in distributed real time systems and how real time systems can be tested effectively.

Links:

• Harmony Process
• UML Profile for Schedulability, Performance, and Time, v1.1
• Rhapsody Tool Suite
• UML Profile for DODAF/MODAF (UPDM)
• Book: Real Time UML Workshop for Embedded Systems
• Book: Real-Time UML
• Book: Real-Time Design Patterns
• Book: Doing Hard Time
• SDL

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Erik Meijer

Host(s): Arno
This episode is a discussion with Erik Meijer on LINQ. This is a relatively technical discussion about the following topics: what is LINQ, what are the common abstractions between the different data structures one can access with LINQ, what is the relationship to established languages for querying, how does the integration into the type system of the host language work, how to specify the mapping between the language level classes and the data, and how optimizations are implemented (lazy loading, prefetching, etc.).

Links:

• Video Interview with Anders Hejlsberg on LINQ
• LINQ explained at Wikipedia
• Erik’s web page
• The LINQ project

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s):
Host(s): Martin
In this episode we talk with Gerard Meszaros about problems and challenges doing unit testing in real-world projects. Starting from a short discussion about the importance of automated unit testing we spend most of this episode to talk about every day problems doing unit testing and how those problems can be solved. Based on this book on xunit testing patterns, Gerard talks about his experiences with unit test smells as an analogy to code smells. He describes an impressive set of unit testing patterns to overcome those difficult testing situations and illustrates them with nice examples everybody doing unit testing will feel familiar with.

Links:

• Website on xUnit Test Patterns
• xUnit on Wikipedia
• Book: xUnit Test Patterns – Refactoring Test Code

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Nico Josuttis

Host(s): Markus
This Episode is part five in our (probably ongoing) series on service oriented architecture. In this episode we talk to Nico Josuttis, who has recently published a book on this topic. As its title “SOA in Practice” suggests, it is a very pragmatic book based on Nico’s experience as architect and project lead in a number of enterprise-level projects – not all of them had been called SOA, since they at the time the term was not yet coined. The episode discusses some technical aspects of SOA (such as loose coupling, messaging and ESBs), but mainly focusses on non-technical aspects of implementing an SOA.

Links:

• Book: Service-Oriented Architecture – Concepts, Technology, and Design by Thomas Erl
• The Business Process Modeling Notation
• Book: Service Orient or Be Doomed – How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business by Jason Bloomberg, Ronald Schmelzer
• SOA in Practice book
• Nico’s SOA Glossary
• Book: Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices by Paul Allan
• Nico’s Homepage

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Recording Venue: OOPSLA 2007
Guest(s): Dan Grossman

Host(s): Markus
This episode features a discussion with Dan Grossman about an essay paper he wrote for this year’s OOPSLA conference. The paper is about an analogy between garbage collection and transactional memory. In addition to seeing the beauty of the analogy, the discussion also serves as a good introduction to transactional memory (which was mentioned in the Goetz/Holmes episode) and – to some extent – to garbage collection.

Links:

• Wikipedia on Garbage Collection
• A unified theory of garbage collection
• Transactional memory: architectural support for lock-free data structures
• The paper on which this episode is based. You should read it to see the full beauty of the analogy
• Wikipedia on Transactional Memory

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Gary McGraw

Host(s): Michael
This episode features an interview with the software security expert Gary McGraw. Gary explains why this topic is so important and gives several security deficiencies examples that he found in the past. The second half of the interview is about his latest book ‘Exploiting Online Games’ where he explains how online games are hacked and why this is relevant to everybody, not only gamers in their ‘First Life’.

Links:

• Software Security – one of Gary McGraw’s web sites
• Exploiting Online Games – his latest book

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