Instead of fomenting dissent (that barely exists) in a brazen attempt to boost readership, I’m changing tactics to look at ways in which testing and development are complementary, beyond their common goal of releasing quality software products. What can I say? After my previous post, How developers drive testers nuts–let’s count the ways, I’m clearly getting less edgy. I approached our newest addition to the Klocwork development team, Michail Greshishchev. While he’s a new full-timer, Greshishchev is not a new face around here. The recent Carleton University engineering graduate did two co-op terms here–one in professional
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At daily standup meetings, they eye each other from opposite sides of the room. Sitting on the same side of the cubicle wall is unthinkable. They’re united only by their desire to produce quality software products and their appreciation for coffee and energy drinks. What’s good to one side can be anathema to the other when it comes to code. I’m talking, of course, about testing and development teams. In the interests of generating more comments improving dialogue between two very important functions in a software organization, our marketing director asked me to interview our
Read More »We are starting to see a large amount of Android phones such as the Droid and Xperia X10 (see a review here) and the (soon-to-be-released) first Google phone, Nexus One. With this, expect the number of apps to increase significantly. So with the increased number of apps, do these developers have the right tools to find and fix bugs? Take a look at the leader of phone applications-iPhone. There have been several posts (here and here) that recommend using the Clang static analyzer. Apple has taken it one step further, apparently rejecting iPhone apps that
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I have always loved “I’m gonna write me a new minivan” from Scott Adams. To me, it never gets old. Originally published in 1998, the theme that applied then still does today: driving 100% of defects or bugs out of the code-base is a laudable goal, but is it really the right one? I would have to argue no. There’s no silver bullet out there that will find all software defects and solve issues automagically, and until there is, software development will continue to struggle with prioritization. Unfortunately, we live in a world of finite resources and constantly evolving demands,
Read More »Succinctly communicating what Klocwork does and how it helps improve productivity during code reviews, integration builds, and of course for developers is always a challenge. We’ve tried to capture this visually with this simple SDLC image, and of course we always talk about the importance of finding bugs early. Then somebody else comes along and makes the point in a way you never thought of… here’s a funny that’s been going around for some time, but I figured it’s worth passing along to the Kloctalk readers
Read More »Ever been faced with that glassy-eyed expression, the look of unthinking, unwholesome fear when some long, incomprehensible word escapes your geeky mouth and upsets the maiden aunts around the once-a-year, wear-your-best-tie, try-not-to-die-before-the-cake’s-all-gone tea table? OK, so this paper won’t help you in that situation whatsoever, but if you replace your maiden aunts with a bunch of your best geek friends, and replace the tea with a sturdy helping of Dew, knowing how a real whole program analysis solution works might just conceivably come in handy. Some day. “Dude, I was totally stoked when I read
Read More »Testing can have many goals: to assess quality, to assess conformance to specification, to help managers decide whether or not to ship, etc. These all affect a test team’s approach. Very often, it seems that “Finding Important Bugs Early” is the tester’s primary goal during a development cycle in an agile environment. It’s the ideal: find a quality impacting issue as quickly as possible after it was introduced so that the code is fresh in developer’s minds. “Finding Important Bugs Early” is a goal shared by countless test teams. It struck me as odd, then,
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