Software Generalist

Reading Notebook: 15-Jan-09

Comments in italics are mine and express my own views, thoughts and opinions

Developer’s Guide to Debugging by M. Wloka, et al.:

Data structure instrumentation (pp. 54-55) - I devised a visual method called Colometric Computer Memory Dating http://www.dumpanalysis.org/blog/index.php/2008/04/16/computer-colometric-memory-dating-part-1/

Too much detailed data from memory profiler (p. 55) - This is true indeed in the case of UMDH or user mode stack trace db on Windows

Memory usage increase might also be because of not cleared buffers or containers after functional iterations (p. 61) - I might need to investigate this on Windows to add to my pattern collection

Concurrent Programming on Windows by J. Duffy:

Peterson’s algorithm simplifies DD’s (pp. 53 - 54)

Lamport’s Bakery algorithm, thread failure in critical region doesn’t destroy liveness (pp. 54 - 55)

Most modern synchronization primitives are built using CAS, compare and swap or interlocked instructions (p. 57)

Software concurrency algorithms may not work because of compiler optimizations and hardware read/write reordering (pp. 58 - 60)

Causal thread dependence and state dependence (p. 62)

Software Factories by J. Greenfield, et. al.:

Tools lag platforms (p. 4) - True also for T&D tools

Increased stakeholder expectations (pp. 4 - 5) - Does it affect customer expectations? Same limits of troubleshooters pool. They are overwhelmed too, like developers

Agile development doesn’t scale (p. 5)

The need to encapsulate knowledge as reusable assets (p. 6) - The same need for T&D. Encapsulation of T&D patterns in T&D tools

Web services as progress in packaging and interfacing (p. 6) - Are Web services the nexte step for T&D tools? There are some companies that do live debugging remotely

Aspect-oriented methods to incorporate contextual into functional (p. 6) - Can we use this for T&D tools? I need to elaborate on this: eliminate the need to rewrite T&D tools

Software development challenges (p. 7) - Great parallels (word-to-word) with software troubleshooting challenges

An idea of a fictitious company to show adoption of methods (p. 7) - This might be useful idea to borrow for a fictitious software support centre

Batch era (pp. 9 - 11) - Are we still in batch era of software troubleshooting?

Multiple islands of data (p. 10) - Good metaphor

Software Engineering Foundations: A Software Science Perspective, by Y. Wang:

Didn’t have time to read today

- Dmitry Vostokov @ SoftwareGeneralist.com -