Large Software Projects and Education

Students record a Radio Show with AudioBoo

We all know that many real life software projects are large. Some are even obscenly large. But in universities students engage in smaller projects or as individual contributors. Can and should software engineering education be made more realistic in that students work in large scale projects? In “A Software Engineering…

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Requirements Lifecycles

SDLC requirements life cycle phases

Requirements are highly controversial in software development. There is always too much and too little requirements. They are often blamed for project failure or seen as required for project success. I have seen cases where there were too detailed and complex requirements. The result was that everyone worked around the…

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How fast is research advancing?

In the IT industry, everything is moving at a fast pace. New products and services are released daily. So it would follow that computer science research is moving at a similair breakneck speed? Not so according to a recent bibliometric survey published in the communications of the ACM. The “half-life”…

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Do I have a healthy test suite?

With TDD etc we are all assuming that we have a healthy test suite. Now some researchers from the Netherlands and Belgium have published a way to actaully measure this. Their idea is to plot on one axis the percentage of the total code base that is test rather than…

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On the theory of software testing

C.A. Middleburg of the University of Amsterdam has conducted a literature survey to find out about the state of the art in software testing theory. I will quote one of his conclusions here: Some remarkable observations are: in the development of existing theories about software testing, what sets software testing…

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CPP unit test overview

In my last post, I talked about the economic benefits of unit testing. There is a plethora of unit testing tools for Java but far fewer for CPP. Exploring the C++ Unit Testing Framework Jungle provides a somewhat dated (2005) overview of the available tools.

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Does unit testing pay off?

Does it really pay off to do Unit Testing? According to a study conducted at Microsoft it does. The study quotes an increase in development time of about 30% in order to get decent code coverage. The benefits are a reduction of bugs found in verification of 20% and a…

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SBSE meets FST

Together with Wasif Afzal, Richard Torkar and Robert Feldt I have submitted a paper for publication at the SSBSE 2010 conference. The title of the paper is “Search-based prediction of fault-slip-through in large software projects”.

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