Debugging Software

When the United States fell asleep at the wheel in terms of product quality, one of the “re-awakenings” came in the form of a book called Quality is Free by Phil Crosby. His core principle was that any investment in quality improvement would return more than the program’s cost in terms of organization efficiency and customer satisfaction. Hence the title of his book.
Our co-founder Jonathan Lindo is currently the featured columnist for Sticky Minds (http://www.stickyminds.com/) where he discusses the economics of software quality in the context of automated testing. Based on the experiences and feedback from our customers, Jonathan has done an excellent job of highlighting changes that are driving software testing to increased levels of automation and a “time and motion” breakdown of the costs of software defects throughout the find and fix process. Given the time and resources tied up in documenting, communicating, replicating and diagnosing a defect, there is a great deal of savings to be had in improving the process.
The article has already received very thoughtful and supportive feedback, mostly along the lines that the cost estimates may be too conservative. If that’s the case, software quality is even “free-er” than we thought.

The networking folks do amazing things when they have the information they need to diagnose issues and make decisions. They use Deep Packet Inspection to inform everything from bandwidth management, equipment outages and security because DPI gives them the absolute ground truth about their network’s behavior.

We’ve just introduced ReplayDIRECTOR 3.5 and while dot releases are not typically something to shout about, this release represents the front edge of our “Deep Application Inspection” initiative that will deliver the same kind of ground truth for application execution that Deep Packet Inspection provides for the network.

RD 3.5 takes our log viewing and amplification capabilities available in the Eclipse IDE and exposes the details in our standard web UI along with information highlighting defect markers, transactions, users and even client screen shots. In upcoming releases we will be adding a wide variety of deep execution detail to the log view and exposing that data not only in our web UI, but in IDE’s and dashboards of complementary diagnostic and profiling products that provide management information across the software development lifecycle.

Because we see and replicate every method call, exception, db call, variable value, code sequence, etc. there is no more precise and comprehensive record of program execution. Deep Application Inspection is the engine for the diagnostic train and everyone from Dev to QA to Security to Operations can get on board to advance their mission of producing and maintaining high-quality, reliable business solutions.

We’ve spoken a great deal about the impact of agile on the software development process and how it has highlighted the need for new approaches across the lifecycle. Now it’s your turn to weigh in.

Theresa Lanowitz, Founder, voke, inc. is now conducting a new survey focusing on the reality and hype of agile. It’s quick to fill out and will yield some very fresh insights into the how’s and why’s of agile development.

Check it out. https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LT2SK6X