Little Architecture Huddle

" Monitoring-Oriented Programming, abbreviated MOP, is a software development and analysis framework aiming at reducing the gap between formal specification and implementation by allowing them together to form a system. In MOP, runtime monitoring is supported and encouraged as a fundamental principle for building reliable software: monitors are automatically synthesized from specified properties and integrated into the original system to check its dynamic behaviors during execution. When a specification is violated or validated at runtime, user-defined actions will be triggered, which can be any code from information logging to runtime recovery. One can understand MOP from at least three perspectives: as a discipline allowing one to improve safety, reliability and dependability of a system by monitoring its requirements against its implementation at runtime; as an extension of programming languages with logics (one can add logical statements anywhere in the program, referring to past or future states); and as a lightweight formal method. "

"We can query an application's state to find out the current state of the world, and this answers many questions. However there are times when we don't just want to see where we are, we also want to know how we got there."

"The results of software estimation are important for stakeholders to take care of team allocation and budgeting. A widely prevalent technique to estimate in Agile has been Planning Poker, which is a consensus based. Does this way of estimating take too much time? Are there other methods which can be employed by experienced practitioners?"

" A number of commentators have been talking about the perceived dichotomy between Agile techniques and architectural thinking. In the Agile world architecture is often perceived as BDUF (Big Up Front Design) and as a result is frequently overlooked or delayed in the spirit of "YAGNI" (You ain't gonna need it)."

"Fixed price contracts are evil - this is what can often be heard from agilists. On the other hand those contracts are reality which many agile teams have to face. But what if we try to tame it instead of fighting against it? How can a company execute this kind of contract using agile practices to achieve better results with lower risk? This article will try to answer those questions."

"Agile development methods attempt to improve the software development process, so that we can deliver useful solutions more often, and more quickly. However, despite some successes larger organisations and projects have been very slow to adopt them. One of the reasons is that many agile methods are perceived as architecturally weak, disconnected from the realities of delivering large systems in complex enterprise environments."

" Sadek Drobi talks about abstracting the control syntax (glue), giving examples from mainstream and FP languages: Null, propagating errors, events, asynchronous programming, lists, streams, channels, functors, monads, and custom abstractions. "

" I've been hearing from people that have had a great deal of success using the Domain Event pattern and the infrastructure I previously provided for it in Domain Events - Take 2. I'm happy to say that I've got an improvement that I think you'll like. The main change is that now we'll be taking an approach that is reminiscent to how events are published in NServiceBus."

" Greg Young discusses how to use events to store data, and how testing, versioning and performance are impacted by an event-centered model. "

"Something I've been looking at adding to AutoMapper was the idea of doing automatic query projection in the Select query projection in LINQ statements. One downside of AutoMapper is that projection from domain objects still forces the entire domain object to be queried and loaded. For a lot of read-only scenarios, loading up a tracked, persistent entity is a bit of a waste. And unless you're doing CQRS with read-specific tables, you're doing projection somehow from the write tables."

" Agile was once considered by project management professionals to be a fad. In the 10 years since the agile manifesto was written agile has matured; it has moved from being fringe to being a core methodology and from small software companies to the point where it is used, to some extent, in a majority of enterprise organizations today. Agile isn't a silver bullet though and agile methods need to adapt to the changed context of the enterprise. The purpose of this paper is to examine how project managers can successfully apply agile to their projects in an enterprise context."

"A motley gang of anarchists, free-love advocates, and banana-rights agitators have hijacked The Love Boat out of Puerto Vallarta and are threatening to sink it in 7 days with all 616 passengers and 327 crew members unless their demands are met. The demand? A million dollars in small unmarked bills, and a GPL implementation of WATFIV, that is, the esteemed Waterloo Fortran IV compiler. (It's surprising how few things the free-love people can find to agree on with the banana-rights people.)"

"If you keep your data according to its version number, but need to work only with a particular version, what is the best SQL for the job? Which one works best? Which one do you use and when?"

"There is a popular design for a database that requires a built-in audit-trail of amendments and additions, where data is never deleted, but merely superseded by a later version. Whilst this is conceptually simple, it has always made for complicated SQL for reporting the latest version of data. Alex joins the debate on the best way of doing this with an example using an indexed view and the filtered index."

"Agile development starts to build before the outcome is fully understood, ad­justs designs and plans as empirical knowledge is gained while building, trusts the judgment of those closest to the problem, and encourages continual col­laboration with the ultimate consumers. Architecture establishes a technol­ogy stack, creates design patterns, enhances quality attributes, and communicates to all interested parties. The combination of these two spaces is agile architecture - an approach that uses agile techniques to drive toward good architecture. Successful agile architecture requires an architect who understands agile de­velopment, interacts with the team at well-defined points, influences them using critical skills easily adapted from architectural experience with other approaches, and applies architectural functions that are independent of project methodology."

"Mark Seemann, author of Dependency Injection in .NET, talks to us about the differences between DI and Service Locators and the importance of having a Composite Root. He also touches on how these all relate back to the SOLID principals of object oriented design."

"It's fair to say that the mere mention of the word REST causes polarisation in people. For a while REST struggled against the WS-* wave and then appeared to have surmounted that obstacle only to start to fall fowl of those people who believe that there is a benefit to be found within REST but perhaps not as much as others might like to believe. One of the main advocates against buying in to the totality of what "RESTafarians" believe is Jean-Jacques Dubray, who recently published an article on what he calls unREST. As JJ begins:"

" If you develop any serious software, I'm sure you're tired of manual steps required to collaborate among the various tools involved in the process of Agile software development. You need to take a hard look at IBM's Rational Team Concert (RTC) for its ability to facilitate collaboration among the multitude of tools development shops use for managing requirements, stories, code, builds, tests, deployments, issues, defects and all of the various threads that run through a large software development effort. Hint: RTC has legendary Eclipse pedigree."

" Siddharth Anand overviews Netflix's business model, then he explains why they chose Amazon AWS, and how they moved their data into the cloud using a NoSQL solution. "