November, 2010
Interviewing: The Importance of Examining Applied Knowledge
Sunday, November 14th, 2010
We’ve been interviewing for developers and BAs lately. I’ve always been a fan of using a test that is as close to their day-to-day job as possible (I blogged about it back in 2005 – here). This is the idea of testing applied knowledge rather than book work / factual recall. For developers we use a small class and test. It’s similar to the Thoughtworks Rover problem but has the advantage that it involves refactoring existing code rather than starting from scratch so you can get through it with them in under an hour. The Business Analyst test is similar. It looks at how they think about laying out a story and more importantly what they think is important.
Finally I’m still a fan of exploring Practices Maps during the interview. They’re a great way to see what people value.
Talk Proposal: Managing Normalised Data in a Distributed Store
Sunday, November 14th, 2010
I’ve been working on a medium sized data store (around half a TB) that provides high bandwidth and low latency access to data.
Caching and Warehousing techniques push you towards denormalisation but this becomes increasingly problematic when you move to a highly distributed environment (certainly if the data is long lived). We’ve worked on a model that is semi normalised whilst retaining the performance benefits associated with denormalisation.
The other somewhat novel attribute of the system is its use of Messaging as a system of record.
I did a talk abstract, which David Felcey from Oracle very kindly helped with, which describes the work in brief. You can find it here.
I’ll also be adding some more posts in the near future to flesh out how this all works.
Submissions being accepted for RefTest @ ICSE
Saturday, November 13th, 2010
Submissions are being accepted for RefTest at IEEE International Conference on Testing, Verification and Validation.
Submissions can be short (2 page) or full length conference papers. The deadline in Jan 4th 2011.
Full details are here.