In this episode Arno and Alex talk about the basics of software development processes. They discuss why and when software development processes are needed and also why some developers don't like them. They discuss the theories behind different processes and talk about defined vs empiric processes in general. This episode is the first in a row that will later on describe specific processes like eXtreme programming or the unified process.

In this episode, our guest Andreas Rueping and Markus talk about documenting software. While this is a topic that many people don't like or consider fun, it is nonetheless very important. Based on his book, Agile Documentation, we talk about various aspects documenting software such as what to document, when to document, which media to use as well as specifically a number of layouting tips for nice documents.

This is another episode where we mainly announce topics related to the podcast itself.

In this episode, we're talking to Obie Fernandez about agile DSL development in Ruby. We started our discussion by defining what a DSL is, the difference between internal and external DSLs as well as the importance of the flexibly syntax of the host language in order to make DSLs worthwhile. We then looked at a couple of real world examples for DSLs, specifically, at Business Natural Languages. We then progressed to the main part of the discussions, which centered around the features of Ruby that are important for building DSLs. These include the flexible handling of parentheses, symbols, blocks as well as literal arrays and hashes. We then discussed Ruby's meta programming feautures and how they are important for building DSLs: instantiation, method_missing callback, class macros, top level functions and sandboxing. Features like eval, class_eval, instance_eval and define_method are also important for DSLs in Ruby, as well as using alias_method for simple AOP.

In this episode we talk with Jeff DeLuca about Feature Driven Development (FDD). As one member of the agile methods family FDD is not so famous as Scrum or Extreme Programming but is becoming more and more popular, especially for situations where you have fixed price contracts. As the inventor of FDD Jeff gives short introduction to the method itself, talks about the basic ideas behind FDD and discusses with us how FDD relates to other members of the agile family.

In this Episode, Arno talks with Oliver Jucknath about the art of writing computer games. A lot of myth is attached to this area of computing, and while a game technically is just another program, it is written in a different context than typical business applications. This is true at the code level, where aggressive optimization is a focus throughout development. It also applies at the team level, where collaboration between specialists is pronounced. And the business context is different as well, which in turn influences the development effort as a whole.

In this episode we talk to Christof Ebert about requirements engineering. As the name "engineering" suggests, we need to be systematic when working and managing requirements. Christof will structure RE into several activities, namely elicitation (identifying the relevant requirements), specification (clearly describing requirements), analysis (synthesizing a solution), verification and validation (achieving good requirements quality), comittment (allocating requirements to a project, product release or iteration), and management (keeping track of the implementation status of requirements). In this episode we discuss these activities and highlight lots of practical guidance.

In this episode Michael interviews one of our regular listeners: Petri Ahonen. Petri introduces Software Configuration Management by defining key terms and describing relevant concepts.

In this episode, Allan shares his insights about how learning is a necessary part of software development. He covers the personal as well as the team and the organizational level and offers practical advice.

Michael and Markus discuss what makes a good R&D manager and how to potentially become an R&D manager. You will learn what some of the essential skills are, what the challenges are, and what the 'mission/vision/strategy thing' is actually good for.

In this episode, we discuss with Roman Pichler how Scrum impacts product management and how agile product management differs from traditional approaches. The topics covered include product owners on large projects and product owner teams, facilitating customer feedback through early and frequent releases, envisioning the product, and creating products with the minimum functionality. Enjoy!

In this episode Michael talks with Bas Vodde about how to apply agile principles to large and distributed development organizations.

Sven Apel explains why developing software in a feature-oriented manner is so vital for us as software engineers and why objects are simply not enough.

Recording Venue: University of Passau Guest: Sven Apel Host: Stefan In this second episode on Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD), Sven Apel gives us an overview of programming language and tool support for FOSD. He introduces the Eclipse-based FeatureIDE which covers important phases of the FOSD process, namely domain implementation as well as configuration and generation. […]

We discuss characteristics and performance properties of modern games and outline the challenges for software development.

Recording Venue: Skype Guest: Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadalage In this episode, we talk with Pramod Sadalage and Martin Fowler about database evolution and agile database development. We discuss the basic challenges for working with a database in an agile development culture and how to include database design and most of all, database evolution, in […]

Recording Venue: Paddington, London Guests: Suzanne Robertson and James Robertson, Atlantic Systems Guild Neil Maiden, Editor of the Requirements column in IEEE Software, talks with Suzanne and James Robertson of the Atlantic Systems Guild about the emergence and impact of agile practices on requirements work. The interview begins with an exploration of how agile practices have […]

Recording Venue: WebEx Guest: Christof Ebert Christof Ebert, managing director of Vector Consulting Services talks with Frances Paulisch on his insights to how lean applies to product development. The interview centers around five key principles of lean development, namely end-to-end focus on creating value for the customer, eliminating waste, optimizing value streams, empowering people, and […]

Recording Venue: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich Guest: Georg von Krogh Open source development has had a major impact on both private and public development and use of software. This is an interview with one of the key researchers on open source development, Professor Georg von Krogh of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in […]

Recording Venue: WebEx Guest: Wil van der Aalst Robert Blumen interviews Professor Wil van der Aalst of the Technical University of Eindhoven, one of the world’s leading researchers in business process management and workflow systems. Professor van der Aalst leads off with an overview of the main concepts in the field business processes, business process […]

Recording Venue: Skype Guest: Michael Stonebraker Dr. Michael Stonebraker, one of the leading researchers and technology entrepreneurs in the database space, joins Robert for a discussion of database architecture and the emerging NewSQL family of databases. Dr. Stonebraker opens with his take on how the database market is segmented around a small number of use […]

Josh Long talks to Activiti cofounder Joram Barrez about the wide world of (open source) workflow engines, the Activiti BPMN2 engine, and what workflow implies when you’re building process-driven applications and services. Joram was originally a contributor to the jBPM project with jBPM founder Tom Baeyens at Red Hat. He cofounded Activiti in 2010 at […]

Gernot Starke talks about arc42: an open-source set of templates he developed to document software architecture based on his practical experience with real projects. Also Gernot and host Eberhard then discuss how documenting architecture fits into agile processes and how to find the right amount of documentation for a system. They walk through the different parts of the arc42 templates covering requirements and the context of the system and the solution structure, including building blocks, runtime, and deployment. They discuss tooling, versioning, testing documentation, and how to keep documentation up to date.

Edwin Brady speaks to Matthew Farwell about Type Driven Development and the Idris Programming language. The show covers: what a type is; static vs dynamic types in programming languages; dependent types; the Idris programming language; why Idris was created. Type safe printf modelling state in Idris modelling protocols in Idris modelling concurrency in Idris type driven development and how it changes the development process.

Nate Black talks with Jonathan Stark about platforms for mobile development, making decisions about how to develop mobile apps, how to deploy mobile apps, native apps vs. progressive web apps, React Native, and the future of mobile applications.

Bryan Reinero talks with Harsh Sinha, VP of  Engineering at TransferWise, about Product Management. Mr. Sinha details how requirements are derived from user needs, how to measure product success, and how successful product management is done.

Armon Dadgar speaks to Matthew Farwell about Secrets Management.

Learn how a business that struggled with outages, performance problems, and an inability to ship overcame their problems by introducing monitoring, docker, continuous integration, and some fresh perspectives.

Bernd Rücker, who has contributed to multiple open source workflow management projects, discusses orchestrating microservices with workflow management.  As distributed systems evolve into a family of microservices that must handle long-running stateful processes with time-dependent actions, events, multiple paths through the system, and complex rollbacks, the workflow management model provides a way to ensure clear modeling, correctness, and separation of concerns.   Rücker recommends a federated model in which each microservice is paired with its own workflow to handle retries and other policies and failure modes around that service.  Robert Blumen spoke with Rücker about microservice architecture, event-driven systems, long-running stateful processes versus synchronous request/response, event handling, time-outs, and handling exceptional conditions with compensating transactions. Rücker compares the choreography versus orchestration models for collaboration and discusses why orchestration provides a better separation of concerns.  The discussion delves into the implementation of workflow management systems including persistence, scaling, event handling, timers and scheduling, and similarities to CQRS.  The discussion wraps up with monitoring and visualization.

Travis Kimmel talks with Johnathan Nightingale about scaling engineering management. Their discuss when to hire additional engineering managers and how to set them up for success, how leaders can prepare for “growing pains” as an organization scales,

Tim Coulter, the founder of Truffle (Ethereum DApp development framework) discusses the Truffle framework for Ethereum SmartContracts and Decentralized App development. Kishore Bhatia spoke with Tim Coulter about: Ethereum Decentralized Apps (DApps)...

Pete Koomen, Co-founder and CTO at Optimizely discusses A/B testing. Edaena Salinas spoke with Pete about how A/B testing is used in software products, and how A/B tests can be written. Pete explained the components of A/B testing and lessons learned from running over 200,000 A/B tests.

Bob Kepford discusses Decoupled CMS. Many CMS practitioners are adopting a decoupled approach to improve scale, allow for more specialized roles, and to separate data collection from delivery. Host Jeff Doolittle spoke with Kepford about what makes a Decoupled CMS different.

Ryan Singer on Basecamp’s “Shape Up” software development process. Basecamp has ditched the backlog and 2-week sprint in favor of solution “shaping” and strategic 6-week projects, using tools like scope mapping, checklists, and hill charts to understand and reduce risk.

Pat Helland talks to host Akshay Manchale about Data Management at scale in a Microservices world. Pat talks about trends in managaging data in a distributed microservices world, immutability, idempotence, inside and outside data, descriptive...

Torin Sandall of Styra and Open Policy Agent discussed OPA and policy engines and how they can benefit software projects security and compliance. Host Justin Beyer spoke with Sandall about the benefits of removing authorization logic from your application...

Berkay Mollamustafaoglu, founder of Ops Genie, discusses the keys to an effective incident management process. Many aspects of incident management are counter intuitive. Why does increasing the rate of change increase uptime? Why is culture the most...

Nigel Poulton, author of The Kubernetes Book and Docker Deep Dive, discusses Kubernetes fundamentals, why Kubernetes is gaining so much momentum, deploying an example app, and why Kubernetes is considered "the" Cloud OS.

Satish Mohan, CTO of AirGapNetworks discussed "Air Gapped Networks" with host Priyanka Raghavan.

Guest Sam Boyer, author of So you want to write a package manager talks about package management. The discussion covers - what is a package? what does it mean to manage package? package meta-data; package versioning; the quantity of packages in modern...

Nikhil Krishna speaks to Bob DuCharme an experienced technical writer and author about how to write and maintain technical documentation for software products. In the episode different mediums to distribute documentation and tools to maintain documentation are discussed.

Jeff Perry, career coach with experience in multiple engineering and technology fields discusses how software engineers can be intentional and proactive in evaluating and pursuing career options, with host Kanchan Shringi.

Nicholas Manson, a SaaS Architect with more than 2 decades of experience building cloud applications, speaks with host Kanchan Shringi about identity and access management requirements for cloud applications. They begin by examining what a digital...

Alex Hidalgo, principal reliability advocate at Nobl9 and author of Implementing Service Level Objectives, joins SE Radio's Robert Blumen for a discussion of service-level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets. The conversation covers the meaning...

J.R. Storment and Mike Fuller discuss cloud financial operations (FinOps) with host Akshay Manchale. They consider the importance of a financial operations strategy for cloud-based infrastructure. J.R. and Mike discuss the differences between operating your own data center and running in the cloud, as well as the problems that doing so creates in understanding and forecasting cloud spend. Mike details the Cloud FinOps lifecycle by first attributing organizational cloud spend through showbacks and chargebacks to individual teams and products. JR describes the two levers available for optimization once an organization understands where they're spending their cloud budget. They discuss complexities that arise from virtualized infrastructure and techniques to attribute cloud usage to the correct owners, and close with some recommendations for engineering leaders who are getting started on cloud FinOps strategy.

Michael Fazio, Engineering Manager (Android) at Albert and author of Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack from the Pragmatic Programmers, speaks with SE Radio's Gavin Henry about how the Android ecosystem looks today, and why it's an excellent time to write native Android apps. They explore a wide range of topics about modern Android development, including when to go native, how to keep a lot of decisions in your back-end API, Kotlin co-routines, Jetpack and Jetpack Compose, the MVVM design pattern, and threads, as well as activities, fragments, Dagger, room, navigation, Flutter, and improvements in simulators. They also examine details such as IDEs, API selection, how to choose a list of support devices, Java vs Kotlin, handset manufacturers, XML layouts, and why Jetpack is a safe bet for all your future Android development.

Bastian Gruber, author of the book Rust Web Development, speaks with host Philip Winston about creating server-based web applications with Rust. They explore Rust language features, tooling, and web frameworks such as Warp and Tokio. From there, they examine the steps to build a simple web server and a RESTful API, as well as modules, logging and tracing, and other aspects of web development with Rust.

Paul Hammant, independent consultant, joins host Giovanni Asproni to speak about trunk-based development—a version control management practice in which developers merge small, frequent updates to a core “trunk” or main branch. The episode explores the technique in some detail, including its pros and cons and some examples from real projects, and offers suggestions on how to get started. The conversation touches on a set of related topics, including code reviews, feature flags, continuous integration, and testing.

In this episode, Ori Mankali, senior VP of engineering at cloud security startup Akeyless, speaks with SE Radio’s Nikhil Krishna about secrets management and the innovative use of distributed fragment cryptography (DFC). In the context of enterprise IT, 'secrets’ are crucial for authentication in providing access to internal applications and services. Ori describes the unique challenges of managing these sensitive data, particularly given the complexities of doing so on a large scale in substantial organizations. They discuss the necessity for a secure system for managing secrets, highlighting key features such as access policies, audit capabilities, and visualization tools. Ori introduces the concept of distributed fragment cryptography, which boosts security by ensuring that the entire secret is never known to any single entity. The episode explores encryption and decryption and the importance of key rotation, as they consider the challenges and potential solutions in secrets management.

Adam Frank, SVP of Product and Marketing at Armory.io, speaks with SE Radio’s Kanchan Shringi about continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment – and how they differ. Frank suggests that organizations begin by identifying how the CI/CD process aligns best with their unique goals, noting that such goals might be different for B2C versus B2B SAAS (software as a service). They also discuss how the process can differ for monoliths compared to microservices-based products. Finally, they talk about continuous deployment as a service and some unique aspects of Armory’s approach.