In answer to your question, no we don't have much in the way of coding problems. With staff reductions caused by recent business conditions, nearly all of our developers are pretty good at using programming languages. They're very good coders. Rarely can a problem be traced to a "bug" in the sense of an error in a single line, or set of lines. The majority of problems are the code which isn't there, either because the programmer didn't know he/she needed to write it, or because it he/she overlooked writing it.
We have big time programming/software development problems, of the sort I described. They result in huge amounts of customer disatisfaction and lost revenue. In that we have a reliable, repeatable software process that we are to the point of optimizing, yes we are CMM 4 or 5. We have a well defined structure for requirments and specifications; we use software design tools, configuration management tools and bug tracking tools. We have coding standards that people actually follow, mostly. Unfortunately, none of this process has eliminated the need for costly testing, to find the code the programmers didn't write. I'm not sure what you mean by "big" software. We have suites of applications, all of which must play together. The total is on the order of multiple millions of lines. We are constantly releasing new versions of this software which must work with previous versions of our own applications, and lots of versions of other peoples' applications. It's much worse than trying to maintain a monolithic IT or military application that is the same number of total lines. Ruven Brooks -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Lionel Draghi Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 5:56 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: PPIG discuss: Effect of letter casing on readability - New thread: relevance Brooks, Ruven wrote: >... > > >How common is this sort of thing? My claim is that with programmers >who are experienced in a particular language or syntax, the readability >of the code or particular syntactic constructs in the languages account for few if >any of > > >the bugs. > Just for curiosity, have you any software experience in big software, including maintenance? >Far, far more common and serious are problems that are either due to >developer's failure to understand how the code was supposed to work, or >incompatibilities between the new application/version and existing applications or >hardware configurations. > > Sure, but you can't neglect all the small things that cause you to waste 1 just because something else cause you to waste 10. Especially because it's easy and almost free to choose a readable langage and to enforce some common presentation rules. >The problem of application compatibility is problem the most serious >software development problem today. Most products get through unit testing and >initial integration testing quite fast; it's when you start testing them together on >a machine that has both kinds of networking adapters or both version of SuperAppPlus >that the bug count starts to climb. Note that this is really an requirements >problem, not a coding problem; > So i understand that your company has no more programming problems, and this sounds very impressive. You are probably somewhere between CMM 7 and 8 :-) -- Lionel Draghi http://swpat.ffii.org/index.fr.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
