Eric Newcomer's Weblog: TP Never Dies: The ACMS/DECtp Reunion
In this posting Eric muses on the old Tranaction Processing system he was involved with in DEC and how it lives on in various guises.
This reminded me of the IT Conversations interview with Eric on TP (June 2003) (so I've filed this as an audio recommendation) which probed his roots in the TP world, and how this mapped well into the modern service oriented architectures world of IONA.
On my drive over to Kilmore Quay on Sunday morning I listened in to another excellent IT Conversations podcast: Negotiating Trust (Kent Seamons, Professor of Computer Science, Brigham Young). This combined discussions of federated identify with concepts of policy-based negotiation and emerging security policy protcols and languages. I found it an excellent overview of the space, which is at the edge of our interests in the TSSG in policy-based management of communications services and networks. The key issue is that in the Internet world (and increasingly in the mobile world) one cannot know in advance who one's users are (they cannot be pre-registered). If this is the case how can one negotiate access in a secure way without impacting on privacy?
Another entry I should add to the audio recommendations on Agile Methods is the IT Conversations presentation by Ken Schwaber (at the SDForum Agile Summit held July 21, 2004 in Palo Alto, California). This is an excellent discussion of the use of agile methods at the level of project management, and in particular it discusses the types of situation where it should be employed, and the types of problem it does not solve (such as accurate resource planning to enable fixed price contracts).
Over the past few months I've been listening to a lot of Podcasts (audio content distributed as MP3 audio files) some of these are interviews, some telephone interviews, some are recordings of conference presentations. I thought I'd start a new topic to lodge my reviews of the best ones, mainly for reference for others in the TSSG.
The TSSG is currently hosting a week-long course on agile methods to help upskill our commercial and applied teams (we're planning a pervasive agile methodology for capturing as much of our software output on various projects into a coherent software testbed).
One of the gurus of agile development is Alistair Cockburn. In this interview with Doug Kaye of IT Conversations he discusses the differences between agile and extreme programming and others things:
Agile Software Development
(Transcript)
Kent Beck is the founder of eXtreme Programming (XP) and in this interview his discusses its philosophy:
Developer Testing
(Transcript)