No bug left behind

The Software Quality Digest with the latest articles, blog postings and discussions about software quality, testing, usability, accessibility, scalability and related topics of the past week. If you have a relevant link for the Software Quality Digest, please let us know and we would be happy to include it in the next digest.

Software Quality and Testing

• To Assert or Not To Assert – Miško Hevery on asserts, testability and defensive programming
• Quality is what I work for – Mark Needham explains what software quality means to him and why it’s important
• [PDF] Microsoft Study: TDD reduced defects by 40%-90%, increased dev time by 15% – 35% – A whitepaper by Microsoft Research about a study comparing classic to TDD development efforts
• Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day – “The high level of our process is dead simple: Continuously integrate (commit early and often). On commit automatically run all tests. If the tests pass deploy to the cluster. If the deploy succeeds, repeat.”
• Book gives managers a software testing reality check – Quick review of Perfect Software And Other Illusions About Testing, a new book about software quality and testing

Performance and Scalability

• Concurrency Runtime and Windows 7 – Scalability and performance improvements in Windows 7
• The Canonical Cloud Architecture – Todd Hoff of High Scalability with an introductory post on cloud computing and applications

Usability and Accessibility

• Steve Krug on the least you can do about usability – Software usability presentation by the author of the excellent Don’t Make Me Think
• Survey of Preferences of Screen Readers Users – Interesting survey results that show what web technologies and techniques screen reader users prefer and how they navigate web pages
• Quality is Better When You Feel Good – How effective design and aesthetics influence perceived software quality and usability

Technical Tips

• Page Cache, the Affair Between Memory and Files – Gustavo Duarte on the relationship between memory, files and I/O caching

Process and Methodology

• Simple process to estimate times and costs in a web project – “A simplified top-down process to estimate times and costs of a web process using a simple spreadsheet”
• Why There Should Not Be a “Release Backlog” – “I want to share my thoughts on whether a team should have a Release Backlog in addition to the conventional Product and Sprint (or Iteration) Backlogs.”
• Things I don’t understand about Agile – Chris Johnston questions the strictness of agile principles and rules

Misc

• No Wonder Enterprise Software Sucks – About enterprise software, complexity and architectures
• Software Hell is a Crowded Place – “Software development is a learning process. It’s a process of learning about the problem we need to solve, the problem domain, and ourselves – our interests and capabilities.”
• Software Development “Lessons Learned” – Lessons learned from a software project discussing topics such as process, work environment and testing

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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