In this continuing story about the journey to source code awesomeness, we left off at the point where we identified priority defect types for your organization, kicked off pre-checkin static analysis on developer desktops and saw build-over-build improvements in our trending reports as a result. The next question we tackle here is: What is my cost of ownership? The answer, my friend, is not blowing in the wind, it’s in your Complexity Trend report: Why there? you might ask. Well, it’s because there’s a straight-line correlation between the complexity of a function and its cost per
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Continuing the discussion about the embedded community moving to muticore/hetrogeneous hardware from watch out here comes multicore, embedded software development teams have historically been shielded from mulitcore issues. This is due to the specialized functionality of many embedded application classes and the inherent serialized nature of the C language.[1] Muticore is an ambiguous term for software developers and one they don’t really use; software developers think in terms of threads/processes and concurrency, not how many cores or processors are available on the target. Concurrency is not a new topic either as Mark Smotherman captured in a history of multithreading, it has been a
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Although multicore and multiprocessor technologies have started to proliferate in the embedded market, smartphone manufacturers are in the midst of a rapid shift to multicores due the market transistion from business users to consumers. It’s becoming evident that in order for handset manufactures to differentiated their products, a feature war has commenced: wireless connectivity, video/flash/audio playback and even video creation/editing/conferencing have become are market drivers. CPU designers have already responded to this need, just last week ARM announced its next generation of Cortex™-A15 MPCore™ design and Intel entered the smartphone cpu market earlier this year with the new Atom
Read More »Just came across this post about the 5 code metrics you need to watch. I thought it was worth mentioning as I just blogged about this below (including something similar a while back). These are interesting metrics and more high level, but certainly important. I like labeling duplicated code as something important. I think we often forget how much we reuse code and have the same mistakes in many places
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Refactoring is a vital component for software developers, helping to prevent their projects from becoming unusable, and unmaintainable spaghetti code. Equally important to some developers, is the notion of refuctoring…check out this tongue in cheek look at Refactoring vs. Refuctoring. Be sure to check out the slide deck at the end. Refuctoring describes the process of making your code unmaintainable by anybody but yourself. I love some of the examples of Refuctoring such as “Pig Latin”, “Treasure Hunt” and my personal favorite “Stating the Bleeding Obvious”: For example: //initialize a to 1 int a=1; Not
Read More »Many of us have seen the # of lines of code (LOC) stats that get thrown around as a metric for illustrating how complex software development has become: The U.S. Army’s Future Combat System is estimated at 60 million lines of code (MLOC) The software that runs the Boeing 787 is almost 7 MLOC, triple that of the 777 GM says future cars will have >100 MLOC (that sounds high, but hey, <insert GM joke here>) So, yes there’s a lot of code out there, it’s growing, and it’s getting more complex. It’s tough to
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