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

• 10 Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice) – “To me, these are classic papers which contain deep “things you oughta know” about code – the material you work with.”
• TechnicalDebt by Martin Fowler – “The tricky thing about technical debt, of course, is that unlike money it’s impossible to measure effectively. The interest payments hurt a team’s productivity, but since we CannotMeasureProductivity, we can’t really see the true effect of our technical debt.”
• Paying Down Your Technical Debt – “We have to stop working on new features for a while and pay down some of our technical debt.”
• Development Psychology, Technical debt and The next feature syndrome – “IMHO you should always avoid the temptation to start a v2 from scratch. Take the time to re-code or re-factor the most catastrophic components [...]“
• Distributed Reliability Testing – “This sort of large-scale testing is great for finding crashes that happen only rarely, or that only affect pages that developers wouldn’t have visited as part of their haphazard manual testing.”
• Plunging your way to better code – “So you want to increase your code quality, one of the best investments you can make is a $3.00 plunger.”
• Treat Your Tests Well – “Test code is a first class citizen in your project. It is every bit as important as the rest of the project. Treat it as such or it will bite you back.”
• Quality Must Be Built In – It Cannot Be Added On – “Creating a quality product really is a two sided coin. If you create the perfect system in the customer’s eyes, but you can’t maintain that system and add new features and functionality – where is the quality?”

Technical Tips

• How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data – FriendFeed with an interesting, alternative way to store data in a database
• File Compression in the Multi-Core Era – Jeff Atwood on file compression, performance and multi-core/multi-threading support

Process and Methodology

• Start With the Most Difficult Part – “There’s not a lot you can change in the process of constructing a building. You must lay the foundation before you erect the upper floors, and you can’t paint without having the walls in place. In software, we’re blessed with more freedom. “
• Who’s Your Coding Buddy? – “I am continually amazed how much better my code becomes after I’ve had a peer look at it. [..] Just one brief attempt at explaining and showing my code to a fellow programmer — that’s usually all it takes.”
• The Ideal Agile Workspace – “I put together a list of all the things that I think should be visible within the ideal agile workspace”
• Saying yes to product requests – “If you propose an idea to someone and the first thing they always say is ‘Let me play devil’s advocate here…what you’re saying is impossible because a, b, c’ then they are saying no first. Saying no kills energy; saying yes amplifies it.”
• Counting hours doesn’t make sense – “So the useful question is not ‘how many hours do you work?’ but ‘how much energy do you put into your work?’”

Misc

• [Windows 7] Application Compatibility Testing – “We have taken a very proactive approach to Application Compatibility and our process starts from the moment we first plan our product schedule and design and check in code for Windows and runs through all of our engineering processes and disciplines leading up to our final release (and beyond).”
• 7 Fresh and Simple Ways to Test Cross-Browser Compatibility – “This post is written for designers, developers, or anyone else who has struggled with testing their websites across multiple browsers.”
• College vs Start-up It’s not about the job! – “Here’s a breakdown of reasons why you should go to university rather than work on your start-up [...]“
• Projects from hell – chill or scream? – “No matter how competent – nay, brilliant – you are, and no matter how hard you try, things go wrong. What defines you is how you react.”

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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