Category: Verification

Verification, validation, testing — however you may choose to call it, classify it or subdivide it. This is the category where I talk about how you can be sure that what is delivered is what was requested. But it is not only about meeting requirements, functional or non-functional requirements. It is also about delivering to meet customer quality expectations. It is about building software products in way that ensures their quality remains high in the long term. Verification is more important and bigger than we give it credit for being.

Agile Practices Reduces Software Development Issues

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In a large study of the effects of switching to agile ways of working at a unit of Ericsson in Sweden researchers Kai Petersen and Claes Wohlin found a number of issues with Agile Software Development but far fewer than with the previous plan driven approach. The table below shows…

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The World Quality Report

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The World Quality Report is the result of ongoing collaboration between Capgemini, Sogeti and HP Software. The report is based on a global survey of more than 1,200 CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, IT directors/managers and quality assurance directors/managers from around the world.

My employer publishes a lot of reports on the state of the world as experienced by our customers. One of those are the World Quality Report. Today I had a really interesting and rewarding lunch with one of the experts behind the report!

Applying FixCache to Code Inspections

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Rahman et al. have used a fixcache/bugcache approach to predicting which files should be singled out for code inspection. I have written about using a similair approach for regression test selection (here and here). Their main conclusion is: When used for inspection, FixCache gets most of its power by predicting…

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Reverse use of GIT bisect

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Here is an interesting post on how to make reverse use of GIT bisect to find fix-introducing commits instead of fault-introducing commits. (The link is broken, but the original post can be found at archive.org.) What it boils down to is this:

Since git bisect was designed to find regressions, we need to flip the meanings of “bad” and “good” in order to use it to find a fix.

It seems to me that using this would be helpful for anyone wanting to use the regression test selection (RTS) method we introduced a few years back.

Check my publications page for more details.

Update 2014-01-01: this reverse use of GIT bisect has recently been covered on stackoverflow.

One-liner test cases

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There are many kinds of testing. Detailled scripted manual test cases are quite popular but an article at testzonen.se might be an eye-opener if that is your favourite kind of test case. According to the article, these test cases are a waste of time and effort and demeaning to the…

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Generating Whole Test Suites with SBSE

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I find this rather exciting, generating / optimizing your whole test suite automatically.

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Requirements Precision

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Requirements need to be more precise than just “making sense”.

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The evidence is in – TDD works!

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In the November/December issue of IEEE Software the Voice of Evidence addresses Test Driven Development (TDD). Researcher Forrest Shull and several colleagues have reviewed the research literature on TDD. They posed three questions: Does TDD improve delivered quality? Does TDD improve internal code quality? Does TDD improve productivity? They found…

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Changes as Objects

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http://www.mendeley.com/research/extreme-programming-agile-processes-software-engineering/ In this article the authorsn suggests that many of the problems associated with changes in agile software development can be managed by treating the changes as ‘first-class objects’. Sounds complicated to me. What do you think?

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Issues with Agile Software Development?

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While there has been a bit of research detailling the advantages of agile software development not that much systematic work has been done to find the issues arising from using the agile paradigm. So, what are the issues with agile software development? In “A Comparison of Issues and Advantages in…

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