Integration Watch: Studying reliability



Email    print   
July 1, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Consultants who specialize in jumping into sinking projects to get them back on course frequently encounter the same forms of lax discipline. These typically include a lack of good design, a lack of coding standards, a lack of code reviews, a lack of unit testing, poor QA, and, of course, a lack of basic project management skills. When called into such tasks, the first thing consultants will do is attend to the low-hanging fruit: They establish basic check-in procedures, teach the use of unit tests, start doing code reviews, and so forth. All new actions tend towards one goal: improving project reliability. Intuitively, this makes sense.

It makes sense objectively too, because we know that the earlier defects are found in the development life cycle, the faster and less expensive they are to fix. So, if you improve reliability, you improve delivery timetables and cost. Reliability inherently leads to lower costs and faster delivery. This all seems clear, reasonable, perhaps even obvious.

Most places, however, don’t work under this “obvious” relationship of speed, quality and cost. Rather, their actions reflect the glib canard frequently repeated in dev circles: “Good, fast, cheap: pick any two.” Asserting an opposition between these three elements is to misunderstand how quality imbues the project with the other two qualities. And for this reason, when products fall behind, managers and developers typically forgo quality to gain the benefit of time (and secondarily of cost).

The demands placed on development organizations today reinforce the emphasis on delivery time. Consider, for example, the surge of interest in dynamic languages during the last few years: All of them have the common goal of making it easier to belt out code quickly, despite the fact that some of their features (duck typing for instance) have made it more difficult to assure reliability. For quick and dirty apps, or those where errors that elude basic testing are not terribly costly, this approach is sufficient.

But it leads to dangerous habits in which the connection between quality and the other two factors is slowly but inexorably eroded. Part of that fraying is that development organizations can begin to forget how to do quality work; a lapse that becomes all too evident when they have to write mission-critical software. And the result, in my view, is that important projects become terribly bogged down, because the accumulated decisions that play down quality eventually bring the project to its knees. Welcome, consultants!



Related Search Term(s): testing

Pages 1 2 


Share this link: http://sdt.bz/33538
 
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources

Add comment


Name*
Email*  
Country     


  • Comment
Loading




close
NEXT ARTICLE
Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles Read More...
 
 
 
 
News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>


   

 
 

Download Current Issue
FEBRUARY 2012 PDF ISSUE

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Want to subscribe?


 
blogs tab
GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
02/03/2012 12:17 PM EST

Facebook claims hacker cred
Facebook's SEC S-1 filing form includes a short essay on the Hacker Way by Mark Zuckerberg himself.
02/02/2012 08:26 AM EST

Ryan Dahl steps down
Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, steps back from his position as gatekeeper for the project.
02/01/2012 04:58 PM EST

Bloomberg opens its API
Bloomberg's APIs could lead to a future standard for accessing market data.
02/01/2012 04:41 PM EST

The case for piracy
In the aftermath of SOPA and PIPA, some copyright holders have begun to embrace piracy as inevitable...and even beneficial.
01/30/2012 02:39 PM EST

Tablet sales boom, but applications lag
The installed base of tablet computers and e-book readers is growing rapidly, but no killer app has yet emerged -- hint, hint.
01/28/2012 05:48 PM EST

 
Events calendar tab
2/13/2012 to 2/16/2012
Santa Clara
TechWeb

2/26/2012 to 2/29/2012
San Francisco
BZ Media

2/27/2012 to 3/2/2012
San Francisco
RSA

3/4/2012 to 3/7/2012
Las Vegas
IBM Tivoli

3/5/2012 to 3/9/2012
San Francisco
TechWeb