Software Engineering Radio

Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Bernhard Merkle

Host(s): Markus
During Evolution of a software system, it becomes more and more difficult to understand the originally planned software architecture. Often an architectural degeneration happens because of various reasons during the development phases. In this session we will be looking how to avoid such architectural decay and degeneration and how continuous monitoring can improve the situation (and avoid architectural violations). In addition we will look at “refactoring in the large” and how refactoring can be simulated. A new family of “lint like tools for software architectures” is currently emerging in the marketplace I will show some examples and how they scale and support you in real world projects.

Links:

• Sotograph
• Bauhaus
• SonarJ
• Structure101
• Lattix
• Klocwork K7
• XRadar (opensource)

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s):
Host(s): Martin Eberhard
Recording Venue:
Guest(s):
Host(s): Martin Eberhard
In the first episode on Refactoring we talked about the basic ideas behind refactoring and some base principles why refactoring is a key part of software engineering. Now we move on to more complicated refactorings and discuss three major situations, their problems and possible solutions: advanced refactorings in large projects that can hardly be finished in a few minutes or hours and refactoring in larger teams. Also covered are the refactoring of published APIs and how merciless refactoring could be aligned with backward compatibility of published APIs, and refactorings that affect more than just code like for example database schemas.

Links:

• Article: Public versus Published Interfaces, Martin Fowler
• Refactoring Thumbnails by Sven Gorts, a nice way to describe and visualize larger refactorings
• Book: Ambler, Sadalage: Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design
• Book: Lippert, Roock: Refactoring in Large Software Projects – Performing Complex Restructurings Successfully
• Martin Fowler’s site about refactoring, including a list of refactoring tools for various languages and environments
• Refactoring mailing list at Yahoo

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s):
Host(s): Martin Eberhard
Recording Venue:
Guest(s):
Host(s): Martin Eberhard
Changeable software has been a goal of several technique in software engineering. Probably the most important is Refactoring, changing the code without changing the behaviour (or at least without breaking the tests). In this episode Eberhard talks with Martin Lippert about this technique. The episode covers a history of refactoring, a definition of code smells and how to actually do refactorings in your everyday work. Also some advanced topics – like the ROI of Refactoring or Refactoring in dynamic languages – are covered.

Links:

• William F. Opdyke’s PhD-Thesis: Refactoring Object-Oriented Frameworks
• Book: Michael Feathers: Working Effectively with Legacy Code
• Book: Scott W. Ambler, Pramodkumar J. Sadalage: Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design
• Book: William Wake: Refactoring Workbook
• Book: Lippert, Roock: Refactoring in Large Software Projects – Performing Complex Restructurings Successfully
• Book: Joshua Kerievsky: Refactoring to Patterns
• Defintion of Refactoring at c2 Wiki
• Book: Martin Fowler: Refactoring – Improving the Design of Existing Code
• Martin Fowler’s site about refactoring
• Refactoring to Patterns
• Don Roberts PhD Thesis: Practical Analysis for Refactoring (This is the PhD thesis from the work on the Smalltalk Refactoring Browser)

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