http://queue.acm.org/listing.cfm?item_topic=Development&qc_type=topics_list&filter=Development&page_title=Development&order=desc http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3395214 The Lindy effect tells us that if a paper has been highly relevant for a long time, it's likely to continue being so for a long time to come as well. My first choice is "How Do Committees Invent?" Author Melvin E. Conway provides a lot of great material that led up to the formulation of the law that bears his name. My second choice is Lisanne Bainbridge's "Ironies of Automation." It's a classic treatise on the counterintuitive consequences of increasing levels of automation. Development Wed, 15 Apr 2020 17:22:24 GMT Adrian Colyer 3395214 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3382016 The goal of a hardware root of trust is to verify that the software installed in every component of the hardware is the software that was intended. This way you can verify and know without a doubt whether a machine's hardware or software has been hacked or overwritten by an adversary. In a world of modchips, supply chain attacks, evil maid attacks, cloud provider vulnerabilities in hardware components, and other attack vectors it has become more and more necessary to ensure hardware and software integrity. Development Tue, 04 Feb 2020 13:47:02 GMT Jessie Frazelle 3382016 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3380780 Given that humanity's study of the sociological factors in safety is almost a century old, the technology industry's post-incident analysis practices and how we create and use the artifacts those practices produce are all still in their infancy. So don't be surprised that many of these practices are so similar, that the cognitive and social models used to parse apart and understand incidents and outages are few and cemented in the operational ethos, and that the byproducts sought from post-incident analyses are far-and-away focused on remediation items and prevention. Development Tue, 21 Jan 2020 13:23:16 GMT J. Paul Reed 3380780 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3380779 Some initial considerations to control cognitive costs for incident responders include: (1) assessing coordination strategies relative to the cognitive demands of the incident; (2) recognizing when adaptations represent a tension between multiple competing demands (coordination and cognitive work) and seeking to understand them better rather than unilaterally eliminating them; (3) widening the lens to study the joint cognition system (integration of human-machine capabilities) as the unit of analysis; and (4) viewing joint activity as an opportunity for enabling reciprocity across inter- and intra-organizational boundaries. Development Tue, 21 Jan 2020 13:15:43 GMT Laura M.D. Maguire 3380779 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3380778 Four incidents from web-based software companies reveal important aspects of anomaly response processes when incidents arise in web operations, two of which are discussed in this article. One particular cognitive function examined in detail is hypothesis generation and exploration, given the impact of obscure automation on engineers' development of coherent models of the systems they manage. Each case was analyzed using the techniques and concepts of cognitive systems engineering. The set of cases provides a window into the cognitive work "above the line" in incident management of complex web-operation systems. Development Tue, 21 Jan 2020 13:09:53 GMT Marisa R. Grayson 3380778 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3380777 Knowledge and understanding of below-the-line structure and function are continuously in flux. Near-constant effort is required to calibrate and refresh the understanding of the workings, dependencies, limitations, and capabilities of what is present there. In this dynamic situation no individual or group can ever know the system state. Instead, individuals and groups must be content with partial, fragmented mental models that require more or less constant updating and adjustment if they are to be useful. Development Tue, 21 Jan 2020 13:03:31 GMT Richard I. Cook 3380777 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3380776 Understanding, supporting, and sustaining the capabilities above the line of representation require all stakeholders to be able to continuously update and revise their models of how the system is messy and yet usually manages to work. This kind of openness to continually reexamine how the system really works requires expanding the efforts to learn from incidents. Development Tue, 21 Jan 2020 12:56:47 GMT David D. Woods, John Allspaw 3380776 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3358957 Driven by the advent of byte-addressable non-volatile memory, the persistent memory style of programming will gain traction among developers, taking its rightful place alongside existing paradigms for managing persistent application state. Until NVM becomes available on all computers, developers can use the techniques presented in this article to enjoy the benefits of persistent memory programming on conventional hardware. Development Mon, 26 Aug 2019 13:17:55 GMT Terence Kelly 3358957 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3352692 Software engineering occupies an increasingly critical role in companies across all sectors, but too many software initiatives end up both off target and over budget. A surer path is optimized for speed, open to experimentation and learning, agile, and subject to regular course correcting. Good ideas tend to be abundant, though execution at high velocity is elusive. The good news is that velocity is controllable; companies can invest systematically to increase it. Development Mon, 29 Jul 2019 13:17:00 GMT Tom Killalea 3352692 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3344149 Software reuse is finally here, and its benefits should not be understated, but we've accepted this transformation without completely thinking through the potential consequences. The Copay and Equifax attacks are clear warnings of real problems in the way software dependencies are consumed today. There's a lot of good software out there. Let's work together to find out how to reuse it safely. Development Mon, 08 Jul 2019 11:06:54 GMT Russ Cox 3344149