The Making of Cloud Applications An Empirical Study on Software Development for the Cloud

Cloud computing is gaining more and more traction as a deployment and provisioning model for software. While a large body of research already covers how to optimally operate a cloud system, we still lack insights into how professional software engineers actually use clouds, and how the cloud impacts development practices. This paper reports on the first systematic study on how software developers build applications in the cloud. We conducted a mixed-method study, consisting of qualitative interviews of 25 professional developers and a quantitative survey with 294 responses. Our results show that adopting the cloud has a profound impact throughout the software development process, as well as on how developers utilize tools and data in their daily work. Among other things, we found that (1) developers need better means to anticipate runtime problems and rigorously define metrics for improved fault localization and (2) the cloud offers an abundance of operational data, however, developers still often rely on their experience and intuition rather than utilizing metrics. From our findings, we extracted a set of guidelines for cloud development and identified challenges for researchers and tool vendors

Software Engineering Timeline: major areas of interest and multidisciplinary trends

Ingeniería del software. EvolucionSociety today cannot run without software and by extension, without Software Engineering. Since this discipline emerged in 1968, practitioners have learned valuable lessons that have contributed to current practices. Some have become outdated but many are still relevant and widely used. From the personal and incomplete perspective of the authors, this paper not only reviews the major milestones and areas of interest in the Software Engineering timeline helping software engineers to appreciate the state of things, but also tries to give some insights into the trends that this complex engineering will see in the near future

Team management strategies for DevOps

In an increasingly digital market, and where the time to market is shorter and the quality and reliability more relevant, it is imperative that software development teams can organize themselves in order to provide a faster reaction to the market with more reliability. DevOps intends to eliminate the existence of silos (Development and Operations) and streamline the software production, declining waste and difficulties in its construction, increasing productivity and developing better products with a focus on client satisfaction. Nevertheless, the joining of teams around the same goal causes key managing challenges, namely the management of conflicts and information sharing between teams. The way that these challenges are managed can interfere with the successful implementation of DevOps philosophy. Though a Case Study, the research goal is to study the best team management strategies that help to reduce the appearance of conflicts and enhance information sharing in the context of DevOps implementation, increasing effectiveness in those teams. As a result, this research brings some strategies to facilitate the DevOps team management and reinforces the importance of managing conflicts, processes, tasks and information well.Num mercado cada vez mais digital e onde o tempo de mercado é cada vez mais curto, a qualidade e fiabilidade mais relevantes, é imperativo que as equipas de desenvolvimento de software consigam organizar-se de modo a proporcionar uma resposta rápida no mercado e cada vez mais fiável. A filosofia DevOps pretende terminar com a existência de silos (Desenvolvimento e Operações) e agilizar a produção de software, diminuindo desperdício e dificuldades na sua construção, aumentando a produtividade e desenvolver produtos melhores com foco na satisfação do cliente. Contudo, a junção de equipas em torno de um mesmo objetivo acarreta desafios cruciais para a gestão, nomeadamente a gestão de conflitos e da informação entre as equipas. A forma como estes desafios são geridos poderá interferir no sucesso da implementação de uma filosofia DevOps. Através de um Caso de Estudo, o objetivo desta pesquisa é o levantamento das melhores estratégias de gestão de equipas que ajudem a reduzir o surgimento de conflitos e potenciar a partilha de informação em contexto de implementação da filosofia DevOps, aumentando a eficácia destas equipas. Como resultado, esta pesquisa traz algumas estratégias que podem facilitar a gestão de equipas DevOps e reforça a importância de fazer uma boa gestão dos conflitos, tarefas, processos e da informação

HPC Cloud for Scientific and Business Applications: Taxonomy, Vision, and Research Challenges

High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner. Nevertheless, there are plenty of questions to be answered in HPC cloud, which range from how to extract the best performance of an unknown underlying platform to what services are essential to make its usage easier. Moreover, the discussion on the right pricing and contractual models to fit small and large users is relevant for the sustainability of HPC clouds. This paper brings a survey and taxonomy of efforts in HPC cloud and a vision on what we believe is ahead of us, including a set of research challenges that, once tackled, can help advance businesses and scientific discoveries. This becomes particularly relevant due to the fast increasing wave of new HPC applications coming from big data and artificial intelligence.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, Published in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR