Review Secrets: Asking Better Questions By Payson Hall

Payson Hall broke onto the software development scene as a maverick programmer, but his penchant for imposing his ideals onto others created more enemies than allies and sometimes detracted from product quality. In this column, a more experienced Payson recalls how he exchanged hubris for humility and shares lessons learned during his transformation that help him craft constructive reviews.

And The Origin Of The OSI Model by Douglas Comer

Some fun stuff from Doug Comer.

Test Team Paradox By William Echlin

Successful testers need to be continually critical of other people's work. Yet this critical approach can spill over into other aspects of our work. Therein lies the paradox within every test team. How do we prevent that continual criticality from denting our own motivation and leaving the test team dispirited? In this article, William Echlin helps us look to the bright side of testing.

Dynamic Clustering with Jini Technology by Frank Sommers

Clustering emerged in recent years as the most important system architecture supporting highly available and scalable systems. This article, part of Artima's ongoing Innovative Architectures series, describes how Jini technology lays the foundation for dynamic clustering, while also reducing ongoing cluster maintenance and system administration.
http://www.artima.com/lejava/articles/dynamic_clustering.html

OMG SysML: System-level design language arrives

Richard Goering
A modeling language that can represent every aspect of an electronic system--including software and electrical or mechanical hardware--has long seemed an impossible dream. But advocates of the System Modeling Language, which took a major step toward standardization in late April, say that vision is now at hand.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187200782

Over-Architecting Via Pure Fabrication and Indirection to Reduce Coupling

From David Hyden's blog
The more I learn about new tools, techniques, patterns, and principles of software development, the more I try to use them even though I have been living "fine" thus far without them.
http://codebetter.com/blogs/david.hayden/archive/2006/08/26/Over_2D00_Architecting-Via-Pure-Fabrication-and-Indirection-to-Reduce-Coupling.aspx

C++: The Making of a Standard by Chuck Allison

Bjarne Stroustrup, a Dane with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University (England), had used the Simula language for distributed systems simulations in his research. He was disappointed with its poor performance, however, and in 1979 when his new employer, AT&T Bell Labs, said "Do something interesting,'' he decided to infuse the C language with some Simula features he had grown accustomed to -- most notably classes -- and thus "C with Classes'' was born. It caught on within AT&T, was dubbed C++, and then proceeded to become a support burden for its inventor.
http://www.ddj.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=v?articleID=184403233

Mashing Deadly Myths by Scott Ambler

Sometimes, those "inevitable" constraints plaguing your project aren't so inevitable after all. These myth-mashers kick-start new ways to ensure your project's success.

More >> http://www.ddj.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=JQ15FKJVAJFAEQSNDLPCKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=184415114

Challenges of keeping one of the Web’s largest and oldest Internet services running 24/7

In the landscape of today’s megaservices, Hotmail just might be Mount Everest. One of the oldest free Web e-mail services, Hotmail relies on more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe to process billions of e-mail transactions per day.
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To understand how they do it, and to learn more about what it takes to manage such an enormous service, we invited Hotmail engineer Phil Smoot to speak with us.

Read More .. http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=353