Category: General Geekery
May 09, 2012
Foreword by QA Manager Archie Mitchell
I felt like I was hit by a ton of bricks while attending the 2011 StarEast Conference in Orlando, Florida last year. I was sitting in a huge conference room with thousands of other QA managers and professionals listening to the keynote speaker. In the middle of his speech, he says, “Test by Change is a known testing methodology”. For some reason, I had to contain myself from jumping up in the middle of this crowd and screaming "PERFORCE."
After mulling the statement: “Test by Change”, I thought, who knows about changes better than Perforce? In fact, we use this methodology at Perforce to test our software. When a developer makes a change to the code, QA does a verification of the change. But unfortunately this is not an automated process; this is where the light bulb went off in my head. What if Perforce created a test utility that all Perforce customers could use to automatically test by change? What would Perforce need to provide? And this is where the story gets interesting.
After returning from my trip, I presented the idea of a Test by Change utility to a few peers. Everyone I spoke with could see how useful a...
Apr 26, 2012
As multicore systems become more prevalent, system architects are hard at work trying to provide functionality that allows applications to use those cores effectively. One proposal that is moving from the theoretical stage to the practical stage is known by the terminology "transactional memory" (TM), or "Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM).
Recently, Intel have announced support for transactional memory in their new "Haswell" line of chip architectures, and they've additionally provided some examples of how the new features work, as well as a complete and detailed specification (see chapter 8, in particular).
Intel describes the new functionality in the specification as follows:
Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel TSX) allow the processor to determine dynamically whether threads need to serialize...
Mar 28, 2012
Perforce QA engineer
I think everyone understands that QA is the organization responsible for testing our software. We're also responsible for reporting on the results of that testing, i.e., providing an assessment of product quality based on the number and nature of the defects that we uncover prior to release and that emerge later as customers use our products in new and unexpected ways.
So, on the one hand, we're partners in the development process, working closely with developers to find as many problems as we can before a product is shipped.
And, on the other hand, we're working with the Release team to protect our customers against any defects that might slip through the "creative chaos" of development and into the released product.
These two requirements -- the need to thrive in the helter skelter development environment, and the need to be a rock of stability in the final stages of production and release -- pull QA in opposite directions. How can we reconcile this?
The answer lies in finding the right blend of exploratory and automated...
Mar 20, 2012
If you can pardon the hyperbolic headline, I’ll explain how Perforce came to submit a few patches to the Git open source project and what our future plans are.
We’ve been studying Git for some time. We like to keep an eye on players and technology in our space, partly because it’s something we think our customers appreciate, partly because it’s due diligence as a leader in the SCM/Version Management space, and partly because it’s just plain interesting! But something unexpected happened last summer as a result of this study of competing technologies: the relationship between Git and Perforce turns out to have synergistic appeal with a peanut butter twist, as outlined in my blog articles Perforce and DVCS: Two great tastes that taste great together and Git as a Perforce Client.
The idea of Git as a Perforce client led us to a feature of Git that’s of clear, direct interest to us: the git-p4 connector included in the source distribution. How well does it...
Feb 08, 2012
I'm sure everyone has heard of Moore's Law; first described in 1965 by Gordon Moore, it's held true for close to 50 years. But recent evidence is showing that we are nearing the end of this remarkable time:
The major processor manufacturers and architectures, from Intel and AMD to Sparc and PowerPC, have run out of room with most of their traditional approaches to boosting CPU performance. Instead of driving clock speeds and straight-line instruction throughput ever higher, they are instead turning en masse to hyperthreading and multicore architectures.
But the coming end of Moore's Law is, by now, pretty old news. What's more interesting is: what lies beyond? From what I've been reading recently, the future is likely to involve significant changes, with lots of opportunity but also lots of unexpected new situations to be aware of.
One technique that has received a fair amount of attention is to use some of the other spare capacity in the typical...
Jan 20, 2012
I've been fascinated by the RAMCloud project being run by a team led by Professor Osterhout at Stanford University. The project has been around for several years (here's the timeline), but has been really gathering a lot of attention and interest over the last six months.
The basic idea of the project is to investigate the implications of a single "what if" question:
What if, instead of storing all your data on disk, and using memory as a cache for the most frequently-used data, you instead stored all your data in memory, and used disk storage only as a backup medium for your memory?
The idea is explained in more details in a long, but extremely clear and readable paper published by the team a few years ago: The Case for RAMClouds: Scalable High-Performance Storage Entirely in DRAM. The core proposal is defined by the paper as:
A RAMCloud stores all of its...
Dec 20, 2011
Over the Thanksgiving break, I had the chance to try writing software using my iPad. I first mentioned Perforce's interest in development and SCM on mobile devices in a blog post last May called "What's Coming: New Horizons". I figured it was time to put my money where my mouth is and give it a try.
In this case the money was for a $7.99 app called Codea (http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/). For that price, I got an IDE using the Lua programming language and access to a few basic features of the iPad. It's a limited environment, and writing code was awkward, but the bottom line was for me was: this was the most fun I've ever had with the iPad.
Novelty and Nostalgia
Part of the fun was the novelty of coding on a touch screen device. Some interesting enhancements made the coding experience unique in my experience.
For example, if you type a function that takes a color argument, touching the parentheses for...
