The Software Garden

This paper describes a practical method of developing custom HPC software products using a store of libraries and tools independent from the OS called a "garden". All dependencies from the product to libraries of the underlying OS distribution are carefully severed, isolating the package from instability due to system upgrades and ensuring repeatable deterministic builds on different flavors of Linux. The method also guarantees multiple versions of a software product may exist together and function correctly, greatly facilitating upgrade and rollback. The method is the first known system to expose all past software versions to the designer, and support deterministic single-package rollback without affecting other installed software. An application of this method for building a high performance trading system in C++ is presented.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

When Agile Is Not Good Enough: an initial attempt at understanding how to make the right decision

Particularly over the last ten years, Agile has attracted not only the praises of a broad range of enthusiast software developers, but also the criticism of others. Either way, adoption or rejection of Agile seems sometimes to be based more on a questionable understanding than on a critical, well-informed decision making process. In this paper, the dual nature of the above criticism is discussed, and the arguments against Agile have been classified within a critical taxonomy of risk factors. A decisional model and tool based on such taxonomy are consequently proposed for supporting software engineers and other stakeholders in the decision-making about whether or not to use Agile. The tool, which is freely available online, comes with a set of guidelines: its purpose is to facilitate the community of software developers to contribute to further assessing the potential and the criticalities of Agile Methods