IEEE January/February Issue, Blog, and SE Radio Summary

Happy New Year software designers, developers, and lovers!

The January/February issue of IEEE Software brought in the New Year with another set of interesting and relevant articles on issues and advancements in the software engineering community.

As usual, January/February issue features articles on various topics, however, focuses on two topics in particular: Safety & Security in Cyber-physical systems and Actionable Analytics.

This issue features the following articles on safety and security in cyber-physical systems:

• "Software Safety and Security Risk Mitigation in Cyber-physical Systems" by Miklos Biro, Atif Mashkoor, Johannes Sametinger, and Remzi Seker
• "Safe, Secure Executions at the Network Edge: Coordinating Cloud, Edge, and Fog Computing" by Niko Mäkitalo, Aleksandr Ometov, Joona Kannisto, Sergey Andreev, Yevgeni Koucheryavy, and Tommi Mikkonen
• "Probabilistic Security Threat Detection for Risk Management in Cyber-physical Medical Systems" by Aakarsh Rao, Nadir Carreón, Roman Lysecky, and Jerzy Rozenblit
• "Leveraging Software-Defined Networking for Incident Response in Industrial Control Systems" by Andrés F. Murillo Piedrahita, Vikram Gaur, Jairo Giraldo, Álvaro A. Cárdenas, and Sandra Julieta Rueda

The other focus of this issue, actionable analytics, is discussed in the following articles:

• "Hybrid Labels Are the New Measure!" by Maleknaz Nayebi, Shaikh Jeeshan Kabeer, Guenther Ruhe, Chris Carlson, and Francis Chew
• "Actionable Analytics for Strategic Maintenance of Critical Software: An Industry Experience Report" by Dan Port and Bill Taber
• "How Robust is Your Development Team?" by Lu Xiao, Zhongyuan Yu, Bohong Chen, and Xiao Wang
• "Deploying Software Team Analytics in a Multinational Organization" by Vinay Augustine, John Hudepohl, Przemyslaw Marcinczak, and Will Snipes
• "Using Analytics to Guide Improvement during an Agile-DevOps Transformation" by Barry Snyder and Bill Curtis

To get an idea of what Cyber-physical systems are and the challenges that come with developing and maintaining them, the article "Software Safety and Security Risk Management in Cyber-physical Systems" is definitely worth a read. This articles sets the stage nicely for the other articles relevant to this focus topic, as the other focus on ways to improve safety and security in cyber-physical systems.

The articles on actionable analytics focuses mostly on how we can use analytics to improve various aspects of the software development process. For example, in the article "Actionable Analytics for Strategic Maintenance of Critical Software",  the authors discuss their experiences with, and provide examples, using software metrics and analytics to enable actionable strategic maintenance management of critical software (in their case, software called Monte).

Another topic that always seems to find its way into IEEE Software is DevOps. Falling under the focus topic of actionable analytics, in the article "Using Analytics to Guide Improvement during an Agile-DevOps Transformation", the authors discuss how software analytics have been used to both drive improvements to the software development process and assess progress. This article focuses on how to use analytics in the context of an agile-DevOps transformation. 

Also pertaining to the success (or lack there of) of adopting DevOps practices, in the section of this issue titled "The Pragmatic Architect", the article titled "The Software Architect and DevOps" discusses why the software architect plays such a critical role in the adoption of DevOps practices.

 For those looking to up your soft skills, also interesting in this issue is an article titled "Managing Programmers, with Ron Lichty". In this article, veteran software manager Ron Lichty share his insights and experiences with managing software engineers, including what makes managing programmers so hard and how to build and manage high performing teams.

IEEE Software Blog

This was a light couple of months for the blog, but January featured a blog post titled "SEABED: An Open-Source Repository of Software Engineering Case Studies" by Veena Saini, Deepti Ameta, Ashish Sureka, Paramvir Singh, and Saurabh Tiwari. In this blog post, the authors discuss Case-Based Learning (CBL), a form of active learning, and how it can be used to enhance students' learning of various software engineering concepts. 

Of course, also featured for February is summary of the November/December IEEE Software issue. If you're behind, make sure you check it out to catch up! :)

SE Radio

The episodes featured on SE Radio in January and February are mostly technical in nature, but no less interesting!  

Interested in learning more about Java 9 and how it might benefit you? Nicolai Parlog talks with SE Radio host Nate Black breaks down changes to the Java language over time and what's really good with Java 9.

Are you like me, and super interested in the answer to the question "how do we measure the productivity??" If so, Travis Kimmel drops some knowledge on ways we can do that.

We also had a couple of "What is this and how do we do it?" conversations on SE Radio on the topics of data science, cloud security, and image recognition.