Thanks to a tweet
by Aaron Toponce I learned about the Linux
/dev/full pseudo-device.
Write system calls to it always fail with a ENOSPC (no space on device)
error.
With it finding software that doesn’t check for failed writes is a
piece of cake.
Let’s see this in action.
Unix has evolved for more than five decades, shaping modern operating systems, key software technologies, and development practices. Studying the evolution of this remarkable system from an architectural perspective can provide insights on how to manage the growth of large, complex, and long-lived software systems. In 2016 my colleague Paris Avgeriou and I embarked on this study aiming to combine his software architecture insights with my software analytics skills. Here is a brief summary of the study, which was published this month in the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
Continue reading "The Evolution of the Unix System Architecture"In an open online edX course on Unix tools I was running over the spring with more than a thousand registered learners, I got asked for ideas on how shell scripts can be useful. This is an intriguing question, because the course focuses mainly on performing one-off tasks in the areas of software development, data engineering, and system administration, rather than automation through shell scripts. In response, I posted how shell scripting improves my personal productivity. Here’s my take on how shell scripts are employed in diverse software development tasks. I plan to post further installments on system administration and data analytics.
Continue reading "Shell scripting for software developers"In the twentieth century space race between the Soviet Union and the United States the former started way ahead. In 1957 it launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, and in 1961 it had Yuri Gagarin orbiting the Earth as the first human to space. Yet, when it came to landing a person on the Moon it flopped spectacularly, abandoning its N1 rocket and Soyuz spacecraft program after a series of fiery failures. It turns out that the problems of Soviet program’s N1 rocket — one cased one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions in human history — offer some important lessons to software developers.
Continue reading "What can software developers learn from the Soviet Moon Landing Program?"I attended an excellent talk by Pia Betton on service design, which according to Wikipedia is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers. Here are my notes.
Continue reading "Pia Betton on Service Design"Earlier today I submitted the camera-ready version of a technical briefing on mining Git repositories, which Georgios Gousios and I will be presenting at the 2018 International Conference on Software Engineering. I was struck by the complexity and inefficiency of the administrative process.
Continue reading "The Shoemaker’s Children Go Barefoot"My colleague Georgios Gousios and I are studying the impact of software engineering research in practice. As part of our research, we identified award-winning and highly-cited papers, and asked their authors to complete an online survey. Each survey was personalized with the author’s name and the paper’s title and publication venue. After completing a trial and a pilot run, I decided to contact the large number of remaining authors. This is when things started going horribly wrong.
Continue reading "An Embarrassing Failure"I’m sure I’m not the only person on earth facing a complex and expensive analytical processing task. The one I’ve been working on for the past couple of years, runs on the GHTorrent 98.5 GB data set of GitHub process data. It comprises 99 SQL queries (2599 lines of SQL code in total) and takes more than 20 hours to run on a hefty server. To make the job’s parts run efficiently and reliably I implemented simple-rolap, a bare-bones relational online analytical processing tool suite. To ensure the queries produce correct results, I wrote RDBUnit, a unit testing framework for relational database queries. Here is a quick overview on how to use the two.
Continue reading "Modular SQL Queries with Unit Tests"The International Conference on Software Engineering is the premier research conference on the topic. This year it began with a keynote address by the Eclipse Foundation Executive Director, Mike Milinkovich, on Open Collaboration: The Eclipse Way.
Continue reading "Open Collaboration at Eclipse"Today I put online two diagrams depicting the architecture of the Unix operating system, one for the 1972 First Research Edition and one for FreeBSD, one of its direct descendants. Here are the details on how I created these diagrams.
Continue reading "Unix Architecture Evolution Diagrams"In the words of the web’s inventor Marc Andreessen, “software is eating the world”. Ever more products, services, and entire industries, existing ones as well as new, are running on software. In a report recently published by the European Commission, I argue that significant investment in software engineering research can help Europe stay on top and even lead a world that is increasingly defined and shaped by software.
Continue reading "Research Priorities in Software Technologies"At the 2016 Foundations of Software Engineering conference, a panel discussed the state of software engineering research. The panelists were asked to reflect on three questions.
Continue reading "The State of Software Engineering Research"As software developers, we talk about code smells, design smells, and even configuration smells. While reviewing some code, it occurred to me that revision control smells are also distinguishable and important. Here are some obvious ones and my recommendations for avoiding them. An orderly revision control repository is a sign of professionalism.
Continue reading "Revision Control Smells"I was privileged to hear Grady Booch deliver a keynote on the Future in Software Engineering. Here are my notes of some important statements and interesting soundbytes.
Continue reading "Grady Booch on the Future in Software Engineering"Let’s face it: not all software developers are superstar programmers (and, trust me, not all luminary developers program in a sane way.) This means that when we maintain existing code, we must be very careful to avoid breaking or degrading the system we work on. Why? Because a failure of a running system can affect operations, people, profits, property, and sometimes even lives. Here are the rules.
Continue reading "First, Do No Harm"Increasingly, software is provided as a service. Managing and controlling the service’s provision is tricky, but tools for service orchestration, such as Rundeck, can make our lives easier. Take software deployment as an example. A well-run IT shop will have automated both the building of its software using tools like make, Ant, and Maven and the configuration of the hosts the software runs on with CFEngine, Chef, or Puppet (see the post “Don’t Install Software by Hand”). Furthermore, version control tools and continuous integration will manage the software and the configuration recipes, handling developer contributions, reviews, traceability, branches, logging, and sophisticated workflows. However, these tools still leave a gap between the software that has been built and is ready to deploy, and the server that has been configured with the appropriate components and libraries and is ready to run the software.
Continue reading "Service Orchestration with Rundeck"
Running a top-notch software development organization used to be a capital-intensive endeavor, requiring significant technical and organizational resources, all managed through layers of bureaucracy. Not anymore. First, many of the pricey systems and tools that we developers need to work effectively are usually available for free as open source software. More importantly, cheap, cloud-based offerings do away with the setup, maintenance, and user support costs and complexity associated with running these systems. Here are just a few of the services and providers that any developer group can easily tap into (you can find many more listed here):
Continue reading "Developing in the Cloud"In the 1920s, the Ford Motor Company embarked on an ill-fated attempt to establish an industrial town in an Amazon rainforest as a way to secure a cultivated rubber supply for its cars’ wheels. At the time, it already owned ore mines, forests, and a steel foundry to produce the raw materials for its cars; today, it buys from external suppliers, even its cars’ electronic control units. How do these two phases of the automotive industry’s history relate to the way we currently develop and adopt infrastructure in our profession?
Continue reading "Bespoke Infrastructures"The environment we work in as developers can make a tremendous difference on our productivity and well-being. I’ve often seen myself get trapped in an unproductive setup through a combination of inertia, sloth, and entropy. Sometimes I put-off investing in new, better tools, at other times I avoid the work required to automate a time-consuming process, and, also, as time goes by, changes in my environment blunt the edge of my setup. I thus occasionally enter into a state where my productivity suffers death by a thousand cuts. I’ve also seen the same situation when working with colleagues: cases where to achieve a simple task they waste considerable time and energy jumping through multiple hoops.
Continue reading "The Frictionless Development Environment Scorecard"If estimating the time needed for implementing some software is difficult, coming up with a figure for the time required to debug it is nigh on impossible. Bugs can lurk in the most obscure corners of the system, or even in the crevices of third-party libraries and components. Ask some developers for a time estimate, and don’t be surprised if an experienced one snaps back, “I’ve found the bug when I’ve found the bug.” Thankfully, there are some tools that allow methodical debugging, thereby giving you a sense of progress and a visible target. A method I’ve come to appreciate over the past few months is differential debugging. Under it, you compare a known good system with the buggy one, working toward the problem source.
Continue reading "Differential Debugging"“I don’t know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran”
— Tony Hoare
Continue reading "Portability: Goodies vs. the hair shirt"
Although I'm a happy (also paying) user of GitHub's offerings, there are times when I prefer to host a private repository on a server I control. Setting up your own Git server can be useful if you're isolated from the public internet, if you're subject to inflexible regulations, or if you simply want features different from those offered by GitHub (and other similar providers). Setting up a Git server on a Unix (Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, Solaris, AIX) machine isn't difficult, but there are many details to observe. Here is a complete guide.
Continue reading "How to Create Your Own Git Server"Systems software is the low-level infrastructure that applications run on: the operating systems, language runtimes, libraries, databases, application servers, and many other components that churn our bits 24/7. It’s the mother of all code. In contrast to application software, which is constructed to meet specific use cases and business objectives, systems software should be able to serve correctly any reasonable workload. Consequently, it must be extremely reliable and efficient. When it works like that, it’s a mighty tool that lets applications concentrate on meeting their users’ needs. When it doesn’t, the failures are often spectacular. Let’s see how we go about creating such software.
Continue reading "Systems Software"Written by Dennis Mancl and Steven Fraser
Continue reading "Software Tools Research: SPLASH Panel Discussion"If I program in many high and low-level languages, but dont write systems code, I am a quiche programmer or a code monkey. And if my code runs without errors, and I know the complexity of all algorithms; and if my servers have hundreds of cores and gigabytes of RAM, but dont write systems code, I am nothing. And if I run the hippest kernel, and install the neatest apps, but dont write systems code, it profiteth me nothing.
Continue reading "Systems Code"A declarative programming style focuses on what you want your program to do rather than how to perform the task. Through diverse programming techniques, libraries, and specialized languages, you end up with code that sidesteps nitty-gritty implementation details, dealing instead with a task’s big picture.
Continue reading "The Importance of Being Declarative"Let’s say you want to display a JPEG-compressed image, calculate Pearson’s correlation coefficient, parse an XML file, or create a key-value store. You can often choose between using the functionality of the application’s platform (Java EE or .NET), calling one of several available external libraries, or writing the code on your own. It isn’t an easy choice because you have many factors to consider. Specifically, you must take into account the task’s complexity, as well as the licensing, quality, and support of competing alternatives. See how you can narrow down your choice by eliminating alternatives at the earliest possible decision point.
Continue reading "APIs, Libraries, and Code"A substitution of a comma with a period in project Mercury's working Fortran code compromised the accuracy of the results, rendering them unsuitable for longer orbital missions. How probable are such events and how does a programming language's design affect their likelihood and severity? In a paper I recently presented at the 4th Annual International Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools I showed results obtained by randomly perturbing similar programs written in diverse languages to see whether the compiler or run-time system would detect those changes as errors, or whether these would end-up generating incorrect output.
Continue reading "Programming Languages vs. Fat Fingers"The virtual machine (VM) is the most dazzling comeback in information technology. IBM implemented a VM platform architecture in the late 1960s in its CP/CMS operating system. The company’s goal was to provide the time-sharing capabilities that its batch-oriented System/360 lacked. Thus a simple control program (CP) created a VM environment where multiple instances of the single-user CMS operating system could run in parallel. Thirty years later, virtualization was rediscovered when companies like VMware found ways to virtualize the less accommodating Intel x86 processor architecture. The popularity of Intel’s platform and the huge amount of software running on it made virtualization an attractive proposition, spawning within a decade tens of proprietary and open source virtualization platforms.
Continue reading "Virtualize Me"An IT system’s setup and configuration is a serious affair. It increasingly affects us developers mainly due to the proliferation and complexity of internet-facing systems. Fortunately, we can control and conquer this complexity by adopting IT-system configuration management tools.
Continue reading "Don't Install Software by Hand"RCS stands for Revision Control System. You may have never heard it, because it's more than a quarter-century old; a paper describing it was published in 1985. Although its commands are still available in most Unix distributions and it's one of the easiest systems to use in a single-user scenario, it is clearly showing its age when compared to more modern systems. Here is how to move an existing project managed with RCS to the 21st century and Git, while preserving all its history.
Continue reading "Importing an RCS Project into Git"Even by our field’s dizzying rate of progress I wouldn’t expect to revisit the subject of version control just six years after I first wrote about it in this column (Version Control Systems. Software, 22(5):108–109, September/October 2005). Yet here we are. The new kid on the block is git, a distributed revision control system available on all mainstream development platforms through a Free Software license. Git, a brainchild of Linus Torvalds, began its life in 2005 as the revision management system used for coordinating the development of the Linux kernel. Over the years its functionality, portability, efficiency, and third-party adoption have evolved by leaps and bounds to make it its category’s leader. (Two other systems with similar characteristics are Mercurial and Bazaar.)
Continue reading "Git"DLL hell was a condition that often afflicted unfortunate users of old Microsoft Windows versions. Under it, the installation of one program would render others unusable due to incompatibilities between dynamically linked libraries. Suffering users would have to carefully juggle their conflicting DLLs to find a stable configuration. Similar problems distress any administrator manually installing software that depends on incompatible versions of other helper modules.
Continue reading "Package Management Systems"The refactorings that a good integrated development environment can perform are impressive. Yet, there are many reasons to master some cheap-and-cheerful alternative approaches. First, there will always be refactorings that your IDE won’t support. Also, although your IDE might offer excellent refactoring support for some programming languages, it could fall short on others. Modern projects increasingly mix and match implementation languages, and switching to a specialized IDE for each language is burdensome and inefficient. Finally, IDE-provided refactorings resemble an intellectual straightjacket. If you only know how to use the ready-made refactorings, you’ll miss out on opportunities for other code improvements.
Continue reading "Refactoring on the Cheap"This column is about a tool we no longer have: the continuous rise of the CPU clock frequency. We were enjoying this trend for decades, but in the past few years, progress stalled. CPUs are no longer getting faster because their makers can’t handle the heat of faster-switching transistors. Furthermore, increasing the CPU’s sophistication to execute our instructions more cleverly has hit the law of diminishing returns. Consequently, CPU manufacturers now package the constantly increasing number of transistors they can fit onto a chip into multiple cores—processing elements—and then ask us developers to put the cores to good use.
Continue reading "Faking it"Panos Ipeirotis, a colleague at the NYU Stern School of Business, received considerable media attention when, in a blog post he subsequently removed, he discussed how his aggressive use of plagiarism detection software on student assignments poisoned the classroom atmosphere and tanked his teaching evaluations. As detailed in a story posted on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Mr. Ipeirotis proposes instead that professors should design assignments that cannot be plagiarized. Along these lines here are two methods I've used in the past.
Continue reading "How I Dealt with Student Plagiarism"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
— John Maynard Keynes
Continue reading "Agility Drivers"
Which of my classes contain instance variables?
Which classes call the method userGet,
but don't call the method userRegister?
These and similar questions often come up when you want to verify
that your code is free from some errors.
For example, instance variable can be a problem in servlet classes.
Or you may have found a bug related to the
userGet and userRegister methods,
and you want to look for other places where this occurs.
Your IDE is unlikely to answer such questions,
and this is where a few lines in the Unix shell can save
you hours of frustration.
The developers of the SQLite open source database engine estimate that it’s deployed in roughly half a billion systems around the world (users include Airbus, Google, and Skype). Think of the hundreds of thousands of open source components, just one click away from you. If you know how to choose and use them effectively , your project can benefit mightily.
Continue reading "Choosing and Using Open Source Components"Sure, you can write English right to left. You can also write software code to look like a disc or even a train (see www.ioccc.org/1988/westley.c and 1986/marshall.c). However, you can’t then complain when you have to fight with your magazine’s editor or production staff about accepting your column’s title for publication, or if your colleagues refuse to touch your code with a 10-foot pole. Writing code in a readable and consistent style is difficult, uninteresting, tedious, underappreciated, and, extremely important.
Continue reading "elytS edoC"A classic web-comic illustrates how idle Wikipedia browsing can lead us from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge to Fatal hilarity (and worse). The comic doesn’t show the path leading from A to B, and finding it is an interesting challenge—think how you would engineer a system that could answer such questions. I believe that this problem and a solution I’ll present demonstrate some programming tools and techniques that will become increasingly important in the years to come.
Continue reading "Farewell to Disks"flowchart, n.: The innumerate misleading the illiterate.
Continue reading "UML, Everywhere"
Technical prose is almost immortal.
— Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
Continue reading "Code Documentation"
Earlier today I had the privilege to attend a lecture on crisis management by the Harvard Senior Lecturer Ron Heifetz. Here is a list of points that struck me (in the form of slightly edited tweets), and my view of their relevance to software development.
Continue reading "Ron Heifetz on Crisis Leadership"A generous car reviewer might praise a vehicle’s handling by writing that it turns as if it’s running on railroad tracks. Indeed, tracks offer guidance and support. When you run on tracks you can carry more weight, you can run faster, and you can’t get lost. That’s why engineers, from early childhood to old age, get hooked on trains. Can we get our software to run on tracks?
Continue reading "Software Tracks"Parents spend years trying to teach their children to be polite, and some of us had to learn at school how to properly address an archbishop. Yet, it seems that advice on courteousness and politeness in technical communication is in short supply; most of us learn these skills through what is euphemistically called “on the job training.” With enough bruises on my back to demonstrate the amount and variety of my experience in this area (though not my skill), here are some of the things I’ve learned.
Continue reading "Basic Etiquette of Technical Communication"My colleague, who works for a major equipment vendor, was discussing how his employer was planning to lay off hundreds of developers over the coming months. “But I’m safe,” he said, “as I’m one of the two people in our group who really understand the code.” It seems that writing code that nobody else can comprehend can be a significant job security booster. Here’s some advice.
Continue reading "Job Security"A wonderful workshop, titled Software Architecture Challenges in the 21st Century, took place at the University of Southern California on June 8th. The workshop was co-sponsored by IEEE Software, USC's Center for Systems and Software Engineering, and UC Irvine's Institute for Software Research (ISR). Here is my personal summary of the talks; the presentation slides are available online.
Continue reading "Software Architecture Challenges in the 21st Century"1 Word = 1 Millipicture
— /usr/games/fortune
Continue reading "Drawing Tools"
There’s not a lot you can change in the process of constructing a building. You must lay the foundation before you erect the upper floors, and you can’t paint without having the walls in place. In software, we’re blessed with more freedom.
Continue reading "Start With the Most Difficult Part"How can you visualize the developers' contributions in a collaborative project? One way involves drawing timelines adorned with marks indicating each developer's contribution. This is a simple UML sequence diagram, a diagram that allows you to see the interactions of objects, but in this case the objects are the actual developers and the interactions are their contributions.
Continue reading "Visualizing Revision Logs with a UML Sequence Diagram"What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and maintainable software architecture? Over the past couple of years, my colleague Georgios Gousios and I worked on answering this question through a collection of intriguing essays from more than a dozen of today's leading software designers and architects.
Continue reading "Beautiful Architecture"Domain-specific languages, also known as little languages, allow us to express knowledge in a form close to the problem at hand. In contrast to general-purpose languages, like Java or C++, they are specialized for a narrow domain. Earlier today I wanted to initialize a rectangular array of Boolean values to represent the stick figure of a human. For that I devised a tiny domain-specific language (DSL) consisting of two symbols (representing an on and an off pixel) and wrote its commensurably simple interpreter.
Continue reading "The World's Smallest Domain-Specific Language"Today I wrote a combinatorial optimization algorithm to match members of pair programming teams according to the psychological traits of each pair's members. The program appeared to rearrange the initial random allocation of pairs in a way that might match my specifications. However, as I'll use this allocation for an experiment that I'll be able to perform only once, I realized that I wanted to carefully verify the results. How does one verify the operation of such a program?
Continue reading "The Value of Computing Paradigm Diversity"The US National Security Agency has released a case study showing how to develop zero-defect code in a cost-effective manner. The researchers of the project conclude that, if adopted widely, the practices advocated in the case study could help make commercial software programs more reliable and less vulnerable. I examined a small part of the case study's code, and was not impressed.
Continue reading "A Look at Zero-Defect Code"I recently spent a few days writing some tricky bit-twiddling code to implement a radix tree. I found myself making many programming mistakes, and I thought it would be interesting to study them, examine their contributing factors, and think how each of them could be prevented.
Continue reading "Saving the Editor's History"If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.
Continue reading "The Way We Program"
Earlier today I presented at the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering a research paper comparing the code quality of Linux, Windows (its research kernel distribution), OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD. For the comparison I parsed multiple configurations of these systems (more than ten million lines), and stored the results in four databases, where I could run SQL queries on them. This amounted to 8GB of data, 160 million records. (Ive made the databases and the SQL queries available online.) The areas I examined were file organization, code structure, code style, preprocessing, and data organization. To my surprise there was no clear winner or looser, but there were interesting differences in specific areas.
Continue reading "Open and Closed Source Kernels Go Head to Head"The tools and processes we use to transform our system’s source code into an application we can deploy or ship were always important, but nowadays they can mean the difference between success and failure. The reasons are simple: larger code bodies, teams that are bigger, more fluid, and wider distributed, richer interactions with other code, and sophisticated tool chains. All these mean that a slapdash software build process will be an endless drain on productivity and an embarrassing source of bugs, while a high-quality one will give us developers more time and traction to build better software.
Continue reading "Software Builders"Over the past few days I worked over a large code body correcting various accumulated errors and style digressions. When I finished I wanted to see who wrote the original lines. (It turned out I was not entirely innocent.)
Continue reading "Assigning Responsibility"The following gem comes from the user manual of the spanky-new Sony Ericsson K770i (3G) mobile phone. It demonstrates amply the state of the art in software engineering as of 2007.
Continue reading "Losing the War"
Today I released version 5.0 of UMLGraph.
This release contains a couple of important changes: six new shapes
(components, nodes, collaborations, use cases, notes, and active classes),
a facility for adding notes, and the hosting and packaging under its
own domain name umlgraph.org.
The agility and responsiveness of major open-source endeavors never ceases to amaze me.
Continue reading "Cooperative Development at the Speed of Light"“Master, a friend told me today that I should never use the editor’s copy-paste functions when programming,” said the young apprentice. “I thought the whole point of programming tools was to make our lives easier,” he continued.
The Master stroked his long grey beard and pressed the busy button on his phone. This was going to be one of those long, important discussions.
Continue reading "Abstraction and Variation"
It is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt ax. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
— Edsger W. Dijkstra
Continue reading "The Tools we Use"Today, following the yearly IEEE Software board meeting, we visited the Casa Valduga winery near Bento Gonçalves at Rio Grande do Sul. The guide told us that the winery nowadays made all its wine in stainless steel vats, which have largely replaced the traditional oak barrels.
Continue reading "Of Wine and Software"
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
—Ken Thomson, on naming the Unix system call to create a file "creat"
Continue reading "Silver Bullets and Other Mysteries"A residual current device trips leaving the house in the dark. How do I fix the problem?
Continue reading "Modularity and Troubleshooting"I've long felt uncomfortable with ant as a build management tool. I thought that my uneasiness stemmed from the verbose XML used for describing tasks, and the lack of default dependency resolution. Today, email from a UMLGraph user struggling with a complex ant task made me realize another problem: lack of observability.
Continue reading "Make vs Ant: Observability"In the February issue of the Computer magazine Grottke and Trivedi propose four strategies for fighting bugs that are difficult to detect and reproduce. Retrying an operation and replicating software are indeed time-honored and practical solutions. When coupled with appropriate logging, they may allow an application to continue functioning, while also alerting its maintainers that something is amiss. On the other hand, the proposal to restart applications at regular intervals (rejuvenation as the authors call it), doesn't allow us to find latent bugs, sweeping them instead under the carpet. This lowers the bar on the quality we expect from software, and will doubtless result in a higher density of bugs and increasingly complicated failure modes.
Continue reading "Software Rejuvenation is Counterproductive"An exciting new book is about to hit the shelves, and I consider myself very lucky to be among its contributors. Beautiful Code, subtitled "leading programmers explain how they think", contains 33 chapters where contributors describe some code they consider noteworthy. Although I don't consider myself worthy of the book's subtitle, I love coding, and I'm extremely happy that code is taking the leading role among such an illustrious cast. Here is the complete table of the book's contents.
Continue reading "A Peek at Beautiful Code"Scientists in the 1980s hotly debated the feasibility of US's proposed Strategic Defence Initiative, commonly known as Star Wars. One argument concerned the amount of software needed to control the missile detectors and weapons.
Continue reading "Open source as a paradigm for evolving complex systems"
[Newton] said, "If I have seen further than others, it is because I've stood on the shoulders of giants." These days we stand on each other's feet!
— Richard Hamming
Continue reading "Cracking Software Reuse"Yesterday my research group and our partners officially launched the SQO-OSS research project: a Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software.
Continue reading "SQO-OSS Launched"Recently I reviewed the mansucript of Kent Beck's upcoming book Implementation Patterns. I will certainly put it in the list of books any professional programmer should read. When discussing collections (containers in C++ STL parlance), Kent mentions that his overall strategy for performance coding with collections is to use the simplest possible implementation at first and pick a more specialized collection class when it becomes necessary. My view is that we should choose the most efficient implementation from the start. With prepackaged collections this doesn't have any cost associated with it, and it avoids nasty surprises when a dataset increases beyond the size the programmer envisaged. I added a comment to that effect in my review, and later I sent him an email with a supporting citation, which kindled an interesting exchange. I reproduce our email exchange here, with his permission.
Continue reading "Choosing a Collection: A Discussion with Kent Beck"As I refactored a piece of code from an imperative to an object-oriented style I increased its clarity and reusability, but I also trippled its size. This worries me.
Continue reading "The Verbosity of Object-Oriented Code"I needed a UML class diagram of the classes I use in the implementation of CScout refactoring browser. I drew the last such diagram on paper about four years ago, so it was definitely out of date. I always say that whenever possible documentation should be automatically generated from the code, so I decided to automate the task.
Continue reading "UML Class Diagrams from C++ Code"Last week I attended NASSCOM's 2006 Quality Summit in Bangalore, India. There I gave a tutorial on tooling with open source software, and delivered a talk on Global Software Development in the FreeBSD Project. It was an edifying trip.
Continue reading "NASSCOM Quality Summit 2006"In an older blog entry I compared the complexity of Mozilla with that of Internet Explorer by looking at the components each linked to. Recently, comments to a Slashdot posting I made, noted that I was comparing the two products on different platforms and source with binary dependencies. I therefore set out to compare the binary dependencies of the two under Windows.
Continue reading "SeaMonkey vs Internet Explorer Revisited"
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.
— Dennis M. Ritchie
Continue reading "Choosing a Programming Language"Kevin DeSouza and his colleagues in a recent article in the Communications of the ACM published some surprising findings regarding software reuse: reuse happens more by novices rather than by experts, within projects rather than across them, and in transient teams rather than permanent ones. The statement regarding the higher propensity of rookies to reuse compared to older professionals rang particularly true to my ears.
Continue reading "Surprising Findings on Software Reuse"My new book Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective got published, three years after I started writing it. The book owes more to open source software than any of the books dealing with Linux, PHP, Apache, Perl or any other book covering a specific technology.
Continue reading "Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective"It's said that real computer scientists don't program in assembler; they don't write in anything less portable than a number two pencil. Joking aside, at the end of the 1970s, the number of nonstandard languages and APIs left most programs tied to a very specific and narrow combination of software and hardware. Entire organizations were locked in for life to a specific vendor, unable to freely choose the hardware and software where their code and data would reside. Portability and vendor independence appeared to be a faraway, elusive goal.
Continue reading "Project Asset Portability"One indication of the importance an endeavor has in our lives is the vocabulary associated with it. If developers employ a tool or a method, inevitably they will come up with words to describe their corresponding work in an accurate and concise way. I recently heard a colleague describe version control systems (also formally known as configuration management tools) as boring. I hope that this dictionary will dispel this myth by documenting a rich technical and social vocabulary. If you dont work with a VCS I believe this list will give you plenty of reasons to look at what these systems can do for you and your projects. On the other hand, if you already use a VCS I hope you will find ideas on how to use it more productively and how to improve your configuration management process. And, no matter to which group you belong to, I am sure youll find here some new words worth knowing.
Continue reading "Version Control Talk Demystified"
A source code control system [is] a giant UNDO key—a project wide time machine.
— A. Hunt and D. Thomas
Continue reading "Version Control Systems"
Merely adding features does not make it easier for users to do things—it just makes the manual thicker. The right solution in the right place is always more effective than haphazard hacking.
— Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike
Continue reading "Tool Writing: A Forgotten Art?"I have updated the UMLGraph program to run under Java 1.5.
Continue reading "UMLGraph Update"I spent many hours looking for a stand-alone open source metrics toolset for Java programs. Unfortunately, I was not able to find a single tool that would fit my (relatively modest) requiremets.
Continue reading "An Open Source Java Metrics Toolset Is Hard to Find"Last November Ioannis Samoladas and his colleagues published an article in the Communications of the ACM [1] that compared the maintainability of open-source versus-closed source projects. I applied the maintainability index [2] they used on the FreeBSD source repository following the code's maintainability over time, and comparing the maintainability of different modules. Here are the results.
Continue reading "Maintainability of the FreeBSD System"
The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
— Edsger W. Dijkstra
Continue reading "The Tools at Hand"In a readable and interesting paper titled CyberInsecurity: the cost of a monopoly seven notable security experts argue that the Microsoft's near monopoly in the desktop operating system and office productivity markets is creating a dangerous monoculture that exacerbates the effect of security vulnerabilities.
Continue reading "Software Complexity: Open Source vs Microsoft"In July 2000, while working on a paper on the use of slicing for choosing parts of an application to develop in a scripting language (don't ask), I found myself searching open-source programs for motivating examples, and experimenting with a tool for annotating the corresponding source code. At some point, a loud click sound in my mind brought to my attention the fact that although most books and courses teach us how to program, we actually spend most of our time reading code others have written. I reasoned that by applying my annotation tool on open source software I could write a book to present the ideas, techniques, and tools that go behind code reading.
Continue reading "Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective"
Last update: Monday, February 5, 2024 5:49 pm
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