Debugging Software

I’m hearing from my friends in the VC community that Java is enjoying somewhat of a renaissance in terms of importance and innovation. Seems like Java’s maturity, feature set, reliability and supporting ecosystem makes it a great fit for the continuous integration, continuous deployment software processes that are fast becoming the norm.

Not surprising given that perspective, the upcoming JavaOne conference and exhibition is sold out. Now held at the same time as Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, JavaOne is still the place where the very latest products and technologies are on display and where new product announcements are made.

We’ll be there and we’ve got a couple of new things up our sleeve that we will be showcasing for the first time at the show. Stop by our booth #5205 Oct 3-5 and make Java code, performance and security defects a thing of the past.

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.

Replay Solutions just sponsored a wide-ranging survey on DevOps sent to a large cross-section of IT professionals. We’ll be releasing the full results shortly but already we are getting some eye-popping results.

Honestly, we’ve viewed DevOps as an emerging trend. Wrong. Here’s the first piece of evidence: 50% of all respondees indicated that they either have dedicated DevOps teams or teams formed from members from other groups. 50%! That sounds more like here and now than “it’s coming”.

Stay tuned, we’ve got data on tools, organization and process that we’ll be sharing.