Category: 2.1 Engineering
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The JDownloader immune system for continuous deployment [HICSS 2020]
Abstract: Continuous deployment can reduce the time from a source code change to a newly deployed application significantly. Increased innovation speed can make all the difference in a competitive market situation. However, deploying at high frequency requires high speeds of discovering bugs in the deployed software. Using the JDownloader file download manager as our example,…
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Do You Need a Macbook to Learn to Code? (Coding vs. Systems Building)
Someone on Twitter asked this question and people loved to weigh in. Most answered: “No, just get an old $200 laptop.” While not wrong, this answer misses the point. Coding, here, apparently means reading and writing code. For that, indeed, any cheap computer will do. However, being able to read and write code does not…
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CTO vs. VP of Engineering
In tech companies, startups and large companies alike, of the many roles you need to define, two seem to be particularly confusing to German startups: The CTO and the VP of Engineering role. Many German startups I’ve seen simply have a person titled CTO who does both (and sometimes neither). These two roles are very…
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How not to refactor your code
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What’s wrong in software product line engineering? The separation of the platform as a cost center from the product units as profit centers
In three previous posts I had reported about our research into problems with product line engineering. Three important specific problems (of several more) were: In all three cases (and then some), the underlying problem was the separation of the platform organizational unit as a cost center from the product organizational units as profit centers. Product…
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What’s wrong in software product line engineering? Political power play between product units
In previous blog posts we identified as causes for problems in software product line engineering. Of several more, I want to pick a third and final one, before we turn to the root cause of it all in the next blog post. This third cause is the political power play between product units as they…