Software Engineering Radio

Recording Venue: Skype

Guest: Eric Lubow

Eric Lubow and Robert discuss polyglot persistence, a term used to describe systems that incorporate multiple specialized persistent stores rather than a single general-purpose database.  Eric provides insights into the forces driving this trend:  including diverse data usage patterns, low latency, and increasing volumes of data.  The emergence of many free storage servers that perform well much better than most general-purpose databases for specific usage patterns has made polyglot persistence cost-effective.   Eric shares some of his experiences deploying storage solutions, programming languages, and the driver libraries.  Eric and Robert wrap up with a discussion of the impact of polyglottism on architecture and testing.  Along the way, they explore the cultural shifts that need to take place as organizations move from the one-size-fits-all model.

• Eric Lubow’s blog
• @elubow on Twitter
• Eric Lubow’s presentation at the Cassandra Summit 2012
• Slides from Eric’s presentation
• Martin Fowler’s book NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence
• SimpleReach web site

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Recording Venue: Skype
Guest: Kent Beck

Host: Martin

In this episode we talk with Kent Beck about this tiny little thing he created many years ago and that has changed the daily work of many many programmers in the world: automated unit testing and JUnit. We briefly revisit the history of JUnit, talk about how things began and what has happened since then. We discuss test-driven development (TDD), talk about when to do TDD and when not, and chat about experiences in the wild. The episode closes with some personal thoughts about the future of testing and software engineering in general.

Links:

• JUnit at GitHub
• JUnit Max
• Test-Driven Development – By Example
• Poker Workout

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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:
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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