Time To Quality Test

Humans are not perfect

Humans are not perfect, and since we are the ones doing the programming, a lot of times programs have what´s known as bugs, or errors(Fun Fact: they are called bugs because way back in times of the ENIAC, what caused problems were literal bugs who crawled to the machine).

Sometimes bugs can be as disastrous as cracking your program the second you run it and ruin everything you´ve worked so hard for!!! and other times they´re not as bad, but either way the best thing to do is spray Raid over them and kill them(please don´t spread Raid ver your computer, that thing is really toxic).

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Software testing is just what it sounds like, to run your own program and see how it works, so you can correct any mistakes you may have made. This is usually made in order to debug your program, or to give it maintenance(which a lot of times ´maintenance´ means a new bug was discovered). While it may seem easy, it often gives not-experienced programmers(like me) a really really hard time.

This is a huge topic and has a lot of coverage in it, so we´ll start from the beginning.

Why do we do it?

Well, first of all, a crash in your program carries a risk of damaging your hardware. Also the people funding or contracting you don´t want to pay for later debugging, because that is quite expensive. A study from the NIST in 2002 found that this is the cost of debugging at later phases of the development.

Cost to fix a defect Time detected
Requirements Architecture Construction System test Post-release
Time introduced Requirements 5–10× 10× 10–100×
Architecture 10× 15× 25–100×
Construction 10× 10–25×
Table taken from NIST Study, 2002

As

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When Science Meets Art. Software Design

Is that even possible?

If you´ve been here long enough, some time ago I talked about mixing science and art. This is one of the best examples(Notice how I said ONE, spoilers for next post).

First let´s make things clear. Software design usually refers to the problem solving through an algorithm design(software solution). This is caused because on paper it sounds so nice(it always does) but in real life, machines have physical limitations(Memory, RAM, processing power, etc.) and a lot of times, careful planning is needed in order to make efficient what we have.

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And that is what software design is at a basic level. The planning of how to implement software into a problem and create a solution.

That sounds so good, how do I do it?

Well first, it is expected that when you are in this phase you should already have done the analysis of the problem at hand(actually software design is part of the implementation step). With that in mind the first suggested step is to build a “prototype that works” meaning something either really simple or really complex that solves the problem.From there on it´s just adjusting you prototype to the limitations you have. As a sort of guideline, it is recommended that one process should not take more than 15% of the resources. Actually, there are quite a lot of suggestions, the best of them being Davis´s principles for software design which are as follows:

  • The design process should not suffer from “tunnel vision.” A good designer should consider alternative approaches, judging each based on the requirements of the problem, the resources available to do the job.
  • The design should be traceable to the analysis model. Because a single element of the design model can often be traced back to multiple
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Software Engineering: Art, Craft or Science?

Software Engineering is becoming very popular this days and there is some discussion about wether creating software should be considered an art, a craft or a science. All answers seem reasonable so let’s take a look.

Let’s start with the difference between art, craft and science. Art is the way of representing and showing knowledge, art is subjective while science is about acquiring that knowledge and being as objective and exact as possible while a craft is considered an activity involving skill in making things by hand. Now, the name might make some people be biased, when you think about engineering you think about complex stuff and science however I think that Software Engineering implies a little of each three of the categories.

When people wonder about wether software engineering is an art, a craft or a science, it is a science because we try to follow formal approaches when possible and reasonable, it is a craft because experience and practice makes the master and it is an art because there are situations that leave room for creative and even artistic solutions.