Manuel Amago :: Computing.UsefulArticles

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How to Misuse SQL's FROM Clause — by Stéphane Faroult: Many SQL queries misuse their FROM clauses. Misuse them? That's right. Stéphane Faroult explains this common mistake and demonstrates how two types of subqueries can improve performance and reliability.

Network Effects and Social Dilemmas in Technology Industries — Glenn J. Browne, Nirup M. Menon: The authors show that network effects can lead to a "social dilemma," in which consumers' actions result in serious negative consequences for the same consumers and for society as a whole in the long term.
Provoking Creativity: Imagine What Your Requirements Could Be Like — Neil Maiden, Alexis Gizikis, Suzanne Robertson: This article describes innovative techniques to encourage creative thinking about requirements for an air traffic control system. It describes results from three creativity workshops and lessons learned about integrating such activities into structured requirements processes.
Requirements and the Business Case — Suzanne Robertson: We hear a lot about the necessity of finding the right requirements. But how do you know which requirements are the right ones? You must have a well-understood reason for doing a project along with quantified expectations of its costs and benefits. We often refer to this collection of knowledge as the business case.

Improving Software Development Management through Software Project Telemetry — Phillip M. Johnson, et al.: Software project telemetry is a new approach to software project management in which sensors are attached to development environment tools to unobtrusively monitor the development process and products. This sensor data is abstracted into high-level perspectives on development trends called telemetry reports, which give project members useful insights for local, in-process decision making. This article presents software project telemetry's essential characteristics, contrasts it to other approaches such as predictive models based upon historical software project data, describes a reference framework implementation called Hackystat, and presents the authors' lessons learned so far.

Sarbanes-Oxley and software projects — Phillip G. Armour: "If we managed finances in companies the way we manage software… somebody would go to prison." This article explores the consideration of treating software projects as investments. Amongst other benefits, projects would have quantifiable levels of risk.
Updating computer science education — by Jacques Cohen: Prepare tomorrow's practitioners to tap the growing volume of Web-available data and complex programs they cannot possibly redevelop from scratch.

Floating-point numbers aren't real: A nice treatment of the issues with floating-point numbers.

MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters — Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat: An interesting paper on one how Google use a functional programming style to help write highly parallelised applications to process and generate large data sets.