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

• Quality is Dead #2: The Quality Creation Myth – “One of the things that makes it hard to talk about quality software is that we first must overcome the dominating myth about quality, which goes like this: The quality of a product is built into it by its development team.”
• Coding: Make it obvious – “One of the lessons that I’ve learned the more projects I work on is that the most important thing to do when coding is to do so in a way that you make life easier for the next person who has to come across that code, be it yourself or one of your team mates. I think the underlying idea is that we need to make things as obvious as possible.”
• Introduction to test-doubles – “As soon as you start unit-testing or test-driving your development, you’ll learn about test-doubles and how they can make your tests lightening-fast sooner or later.”
• Future Creep – You aren’t gonna need it! – “How many times have you added an additional parameter or bit of logic to your code because you thought it could be useful and it’s easier to add whilst your already changing the code? If you are your introducing Future Creep! and should stop doing it.”

Performance and Scalability

• Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing? – “The next era is the age of Memory and Cloud which will allow for new players to succeed. The tipping point is soon.”
• Measuring efficiency in the cloud – “What can the world of green energy teach us about the future of cloud computing? How can we measure computing resources in the cloud for efficiency, replacement costs, and cost savings?”
• Use Threads Correctly = Isolation + Asynchronous Messages – “Explicit threads are undisciplined. They need some structure to keep them in line. In this column, we’re going to see what that structure is, as we motivate and illustrate best practices for using threads — techniques that will make our concurrent code easier to write correctly and to reason about with confidence. “

Process and Methodology

• How I Learned to Program Manage an Agile Team after 6 years of Waterfall – “If I could go back in time… 3 things I would tell myself about Agile”
• The Power of a Whiteboard – “I think a whiteboard offers loads of advantages over electronic tools. They’re mainly soft factors, I admit, but I think a whiteboard is hard to beat.”
• My Agile Team: More Code, More Problems – “What I’m going to discuss this time is our approach to trying to fix these critical bugs while maintaining at least a semblance of our Agile nature. It’s hard to do a planning meeting and decide on what to work on when you’ve got new things popping up and old things dragging on.”
• If you cannot do a source pull and compile you are doing it wrong! – “For those of you who may NOT think that pulling and compiling is absolutely necessary let me ask you one thing. What value are you providing your organization if a someone who is new to a project (could be new employee, new team member, or even someone with a new computer) cannot pull and compile your source code in about 5 minutes?”
• Customer Development – The Missing Piece! – “I’ve spent a lot of time making agile development work in startups and it ain’t easy. Necessary but not easy.” and a response by Eric from Lesson Learned
• How to Hold the Daily Scrum – “Scrum is simple and Scrum is hard. The Daily Scrum is simple daily routine to help the team self-organize, focus, and identify and eliminate impediments to progress. How do you conduct the Daily Scrum and how do you know if the Daily Scrum is achieving its purpose? “
• Continuous Integration 101 – “More and more people are working in teams where Continuous Integration is used. Not everyone truly ‘gets’ it though… Below is a quick list of things you, as a member of the team, need to keep in mind.”

Usability and Acessibility

• Accessibility 1.0 – “For those unfamiliar with accessibility issues pertaining to Web page design, consider that many users may be operating in contexts very different from your own”
• Brand logos as home links – “My preferred solution would always be for a proper home link but sometimes that is not always practical. Second best would be to combine the word ‘home’ or ‘homepage’ with the logo.”

Security

• IT Security: Blaming the Victim – “Blaming the victim is common in IT: users are to blame because they don’t patch their systems, choose lousy passwords, fall for phishing attacks, and so on. But, while users are, and will continue to be, a major source of security problems, focusing on them is an unhelpful way to think.”

Technical Tips

• Interactive map of the Linux kernel – “There are a lot of books, however it is still a difficult subject to comprehend. The Interactive map of Linux Kernel gives you a top-down view of the Kernel.”

Misc

• The Positive Legacy of C++ and Java – “Java itself will diminish, just as C++ did, to be used in special cases (or perhaps just to support legacy code, since it doesn’t have the same connection to hardware as C++ does). But the unintentional benefit, the true accidental brilliance of Java is that it has created a very smooth path for its own replacements, even if Java itself has reached the point where it can no longer evolve.”
• Do You Need to Be a Developer to Found a Web Startup? – “So it all begs the question, if you’re not from a tech background do you even have a shot at starting a web startup?”
• DVCS and Bug Tracking – “Industry-wide, there is a trend toward more integration between version control and other stuff like project tracking, wikis, discussion forums, build tracking, etc. [...] While DVCS is one of the more interesting things happening right now, it does represent a setback in this particular area.”
• Best Practices for Designing a Social News Website – “In this article I’ll showcase some of the current top social news sites, will identify trends and patterns in their designs and suggest some best practices to follow when designing such sites.”

Related posts:

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

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