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Improving Software Quality

Getting testers, developers to work together signals a sea change in industry’s approach to fixing errors

By Lindsey Vereen

June 1, 2005 — (Page 1 of 7)
A study in 1968 proclaimed that software was in a state of crisis. Some think the crisis has since become chronic. The complexity of software makes software errors nearly unavoidable, according to a recent article in Forbes. The industry spends US$60 billion each year to find and fix software errors in products containing millions of lines of code.

Since 1968 end users have come to depend more on software, and their expectations for product quality have risen dramatically. Moreover, the pace of development has accelerated in the new millennium, thanks to the Internet, competition and the tools developers use. It is easier to write Java code and port it than it ever was to write C code and port it. The crop of rapid prototyping languages—scripting languages—like Python, Perl and Ruby makes it easy to build Web sites quickly. Databases have become commodities and don’t need to be reinvented each time.

“QA is still a challenge, still generally left to the end, and the staff is treated as second-class citizens,” said Ed Hirgelt, manager of services development for Quest Software. However, because of the speed of development and time-to-market requirements, QA is becoming more visible. Test-driven development moves testing to earlier in the life cycle. Tools like JUnit and Ant make it easier to run tests as part of the nightly build process. The concept of a continuous build is helping produce reliable software.

Hirgelt characterizes a continuous build process as one in which a build is initiated when a developer commits code back to the source repository. The product is built and tests run automatically. Problems are caught sooner rather than later.

QA also has been changing as the result of such factors as the wind-down following Y2K and the subsequent business decline. As software companies faced hard times, one solution was to improve efficiency by hiring the most skilled testers available and automating as much testing as possible, according to Elfriede Dustin, internal SQA consultant for global security services at Symantec.

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