The March/April Issue of IEEE Software, as usual, is chock full of interesting articles on challenges and advances in software engineering. The topics in this issue range from the always popular topics of DevOps and security to the related but separate topic of release engineering.
One special addition to this issue is a special thanks to all those that participate in the reviewing efforts in 2017. Of course the reviewers help make IEEE Software the magazine that it is, so thank you from us all!
As with each issue, this issue includes a special focus topic: Release Engineering. The following articles are included in the March/April issue of Software on release engineering:
- "The Challenges and Practices of Release Engineering" by Diomidis Spinellis
- "Release Engineering 3.0" by Bram Adams, Stephany Bellomo, Christian Bird, Boris Debić, Foutse Khomh, Kim Moir, and John O'Duinn
- "Continuous Experimentation: Challenges, Implementation Techniques, and Current Research" by Gerald Schermann, Jürgen Cito, and Phillip Leitner
- "Correct, Efficient, and Tailored: The Future of Build Systems" by Guillaume Maudoux and Kim Mens
- "Continuous Delivery: Building Trust in a Large-Scale, Complex Government Organization" by Rodrigo Siqueira, Diego Camarinha, Melissa Wen, Paulo Meirelles, and Fabio Kon
- "Over-the-Air Updates for Robotic Swarms" by Vivek Shankar Varadharajan, David St. Onge, Christian Gub, and Gionvanni Beltrame
The articles "The Challenges and Practices of Release Engineering" and "Release Engineering 3.0" set the tone for the focus articles in this issue. The two articles provide some background on release engineering and discuss the state of the art in the field. Each of the other articles take a deeper dive into more specific aspects of release engineering. For example, in the article "Over-the-Air Updates for Robotic Swarms", the authors present a toolset for sending code updates over-the-air to robot swarms.
One topic that always seems to find its way into each issue of IEEE Software is agile software development. The following articles appeared in this issue on agile development:
- "Practitioners' Agile-Methodology Use and Job Perceptions" by Wenying Sun and Cecil Schmidt
- "Making Sense of Agile Methods" by Bertrand Meyer
- "Agility, Risk, and Uncertainty, Part 1: Designing an Agile Architecture" by Michael Waterman
In "Practitioners' Agile-Methodology Use and Job Perceptions", the authors report on a survey conducted to better understand practitioner perceptions of agile methodology use. Similarly, "Making Sense of Agile Methods" provides insights into agile methodologies based on personal experiences of the author.
Wanna know more? Make sure you check out the March/April issue of IEEE Software today!
IEEE Software Blog
The blog was a little light for March and April (as many of us had deadlines we were meeting). But of course we always try to make sure there's some kind of knowledge sharing going on!
For those who are also a little behind on things and want a quick way to catch up on the previous issue (January/February), there's a summary posted on the blog.
In the post "Which design best practices should be taken care of?", the authors report on the results from a survey sent out to learn more about the importance of design best practices. The post also reports on some of what was found to be the more important design concerns, such as code clones and package cycles. For those interested, there's also a reference to the authors full research article on this work.
The other April post, titled "Efficiently and Automatically Detecting Flaky Tests with DeFlaker", the authors present a new approach, called DeFlaker, that can be used to detect flaky tests (without having to re-run them!). The post also includes some details on the evaluation of DeFlaker and other relevant resources (such as a link to the project's GitHub page and full publication) for those interested in learning more about this tool.
SE Radio
The SE Radio broadcasts this issue were also a little light, but of course no less interesting! This issue is a technical one, with all discussions focused on various technologies. Nicole Hubbard joined SE Radio host Edaena Salinas to talk about migrating VM infrastructures to Kubernetes -- for those of you (like me) who have no clue what that is, they talk about that too!
Nate Taggart spoke with Kishore Bhatia about going serverless and what exactly that means.
And lastly but certainly not least in this issue, Péter Budai sat down with Kim Carter to talk about End to End Encryption (E2EE) and when it cane (and should) be used.
Also, for those looking for some extracurriculars to fill their free time, SE Radio is looking for a new volunteer host! For more information, see the SE Radio website: http://www.se-radio.net/2018/03/seeking-a-new-volunteer-host/
