No bug left behind

Inspired by popular digest blog series such as the MicroISV Digest (now published by Bob Walsh) and the discontinued Daily Grind blog series by Mike Gunderloy, we will be publishing the Software Quality Digest to share links, announcements and discussions about software quality, usability and scalability.

We are planning to publish the digest biweekly (possibly weekly if we find enough quality and relevant content) and include everything ranging from general concepts and methods related to software quality, tools and product announcements, relevant discussions on blogs and community websites and practical technical tips. Feel free to drop us an email if you find an interesting link or article, we would be happy to include it in the next digest.

Software Quality and Testing

• Asymmetric Risk, Malpractice Insurance, and Personal Oxen – Jeff Bohren on liability for software product defects
• Favor Defect Prevention Over Quality Inspection And Correction – “Our industry is currently suffering from a lack of quality. We ship horrendously bad user experiences in products that are late and well over budget, yet we call this a ‘success’.”
• Stack Overflow podcast #38 – Jeff and Joel are discussing software quality and unit test coverage; and a response by Uncle Bob
• Read the Diffs – Eric Sink on reading the source control diffs of your team to improve your own code
• The Quality/Speed Barrier – “For any project we can find a quality level below which one must trade off quality and speed and above which one derives more speed from better quality.”
• Quality-Speed Tradeoff — You’re kidding yourself. – Software quality and time-to-market; Uncle Bob’s reaction

Performance and Scalability

• How-To Minimize Load Time for Fast User Experiences – Excellent article on how to optimize the performance of websites and applications
• Performance is a Science – Gustavo Duarte on performance factors and why measuring your code is a must
• The Sad Tragedy of Micro-Optimization Theater – Posting by Jeff Atwood on micro optimizations, software performance and writing better code

Technical Tips

• .NET Memory Leak: To dispose or not to dispose, that’s the 1 GB question – About disposing objects that use underlying system resources
• Anatomy of a Program in Memory – In-depth article by Gustavo Duarte about how a program is represented in memory
• How The Kernel Manages Your Memory – Also by Gustavo with a follow-up about the related memory management by the kernel

Misc

• First -Scrum- impressions – “I’ve got to say, I don’t want to go back to waterfall, never.”
• FlaccidScrum – Martin Fowler explains why adopting an agile process like Scrum without paying attention to technical best practices isn’t a good idea
• The problem with The Month Where Everyone Focuses on Improving Documentation – According to Raymond Chen, most people suck at technical writing
• Why Software Reuse is Hard – More Perspectives – Nicole Radziwill collected a few opinions about software reuse, also see the original posting

Related posts:

1. Software Quality Digest – 2009-03-13
2. Software Quality Digest – 2009-07-27
3. Software Quality Digest – 2009-04-06

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