This episode covers the topic of agile testing. Michael interviews Lisa Crispin as an practionier and book author on agile testing. We cover several topics ranging from the role of the tester in agile teams, over test automation strategy and regression testing, to continuous integration.

Announcement regarding the release cycle.

Jay Kreps talks about the open source data store Project Voldemort. Voldemort is a distributed key-value store used by LinkedIn and other high-traffic web sites to overcome the inherent scalability limitations of a relational database. The conversation delves into the workings of a Voldemort cluster, the type of consistency guarantees that can be made in a distributed database, and the tradeoff between client and the server.

In this episode, we discuss with Roman Pichler how Scrum impacts product management and how agile product management differs from traditional approaches. The topics covered include product owners on large projects and product owner teams, facilitating customer feedback through early and frequent releases, envisioning the product, and creating products with the minimum functionality. Enjoy!

This episode is a conversation with Ramnivas Laddad about aspect-oriented programming (AOP), Aspect J, and Spring AOP. We review the fundamental concepts of AOP, discuss AspectJ (an open source compiler that extends java with support for AOP), and cover the Spring Framework's proxy-based AOP system. Laddad also gives his thoughts on the use cases for AOP and where we are in the technology adoption curve, and updates on the state of the AspectJ project itself.

This episode is a conversation with Scott Meyers about the upcoming C++0x standard. We talk a bit about the reasons for creating this new standard and then cover the most important new features, including upport for concurrency, implicitly-typed variables, move semantics, variadic templates, lambda functions, and uniform initialization syntax. We also looked at some new features in the standard library.

This episode is a coversation with Rich Hickey about his programming language Clojure. Clojure is a Lisp dialect that runs on top of the JVM that comes with - among other things - persistent data structures and transactional memory, both very useful for writing concurrent applications.

Philip Zeyliger of Cloudera discusses the Hadoop project with Robert Blumen. The conversation covers the emergence of large data problems, the Hadoop file system, map-reduce, and a look under the hood at how it all works. The listener will also learn where and how Hadoop is being used to process large data sets.

This episode is part of our series on agile software development. We talk with David Anderson about Kanban, an agile software development method that is quite different from most of the other agile methods out there. We discuss the basic ideas behind Kanban, the differences between Kanban and Scrum and when and why projects can benefit from using Kanban. This episode is done in cooperation with the German magazine ObjektSpektrum (thanks for sharing this interview with us).

In this episode Johannes Link interviews Lasse Koskela - the author of "Test-Driven" - about test-driven development (TDD). We cover the basics, the rationale behind it and the challenges you face when doing it in more difficult environments.