Lorena Delgadillo

03/27/06

CS 312

Article Summary: “Assuring Software Quality”

Software quality has been a concern for every business and industry. No software is perfect and no programmer is perfect. You will always have a bug in your code. The problem with inefficient software is the lack of great programmers.

According to Peter Coffee in his article “Assuring Software Quality”, programmers have been taught to produce fast running programs and not efficient programs. But it is not only the programmers’ fault; it is also the software that they use to make the programs. If the application development tool does not provide the proper tools for a programmer, the software will not be efficient. Coffee uses Borland Enterprise Studio for C++ as an example of the lack of tools provided to the programmer. Borland used “edit, compile, debug” as their tools for software development. But due to the lack of software quality, Borland decided to expand their tools to include “define, design, develop, test, deploy, manage” into their tools in their Enterprise Studio for C++.

We can never expect to have bug-free software, but we hope that it can come close to it. As this article stated, programmers and the tools provided to them have an effect on software quality. Maybe programmers need to be taught to program differently instead of learning how to write fast programs.

Reference: Coffee, Peter. “Assuring Software Quality”. eWeek. October 2003.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdewk/is_200310/ai_ziff110448