Joe's CSUMB Computer Science Blog

Describe some of the differences between using an Agile process and using a Plan and Document (or Waterfall) process.  The agile approach breaks work into smaller units called iterations, where teams meet frequently with the customer. This approach allows developers to provide continuous releases for the customer, while receiving frequent feedback. Compared to the plan and document approach, the agile process is more flexible since the development team can adjust priorities as the project progresses. The Plan and document approach is much more rigid than the agile approach. The project is divided into phases where the project follows a linear progression. In this approach, objectives are better outlined, requiring less coordination between teams. This may be beneficially to teams when frequent meetings in the agile approach is not possible. Additionally with the plan and document approach, costs of the project can be identified early in the project lifecycle during the requirements...

     This week I learned about the evolution of Compute as a Service at Google. The reading covered compute service options, such as containers, serverless computing, and virtual machines and the tradeoffs between them. Virtual machines run their own operating system, allowing an organization more control over the environment. The organization using the compute service however, is responsible for more configuration and overhead. If this level of control is unnecessary, containers offer a lighter weight solution, as more of the configuration is abstracted. Containers share a host operating system, allowing growing production systems to scale more easily. An even lighter and more abstracted option is to use serverless computing. Much of the infrastructure configuration is handled automatically, so that developers mainly need to manage handler functions to accept request parameters. Serverless apps are stateless as well, meaning they do not store data between requests and el...

     After completing assignment 3, I have developed a better understanding of the peer review process. I have become more familiar with the steps I need to take before approving pull requests and merging them into the main branch. Previously, I had not put any of the pull requests I had reviewed into an accept state, but now I understand the importance of formally accepting pull requests and following a structured review process. Overall, the experience I have gained from this has helped me become more comfortable with collaborating with others. Additionally from this week’s reading materials, I have gained insight into large scale testing and the thought process behind it. Given an issue, I have a better idea of how a test engineer may address it, depending on the data they are working with and the system under test.