As the product manager for CAST Highlight, it’s refreshing to see a shift in discussions about the “quality of cloud solutions” to “cloud quality solutions.” Recently, there have been an increasing number of cloud-based static code quality analysis tools, or should I say services. A few that I’ve been watching include: Code Climate consolidates the results from a suite of Ruby static analysis tools into a real-time report, giving teams the information they need to identify hotspots, evaluate new approaches, and improve code quality.
Category Archives: Software Quality
Does code quality really help the business?
Most organizations have started to realize that code quality is an important root cause to many of their issues, whether it’s incident levels or time to value. The growing complexity of development environments in IT — the outsourcing, the required velocity, the introduction of Agile — have all raised the issue about code quality, sometimes to an executive level. Business applications have always been complex. You can go back to the 70s, even the 60s, and hear about systems that have millions of lines of code. But here’s the rub: In those days it was millions of lines of COBOL or some other language. But it was all one language. … Read More
American Airlines computer glitch: The day AA customers stood still
Here we go again. You probably have heard, since it’s been reported everywhere, that American Airlines was grounded Tuesday, leaving passengers stranded for several hours due to a “computer glitch” in the reservation system. Because of the glitch, gate agents were unable to print boarding passes; and some passengers described being stuck for long stretches on planes on the runway unable to take off or, having landed, initially unable to move to a gate.
Keep an eye on legacy apps, COBOL’s not dead!
Third-generation programming languages (3GL) like COBOL or PL/1 are seen as outdated languages for “has-been” developers, and do not interest new ones anymore (there were even predictions saying that COBOL was going to die in mid-term.) These new developers prefer more modern technologies, like J2EE or .NET, and, worryingly, educational organizations provide few learning opportunities for 3GLs.
Using Hibernate Frameworks: What Are the Best Practices?
I’ve recently been involved in helping CAST Research Labs analyze a large sample of Java EE applications (496 apps), looking to understand the impact of different frameworks on application structural quality. We analyzed these applications using CAST’s Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) to identify critical violations of architectural and coding practices. While looking at the critical violations that were detected by CAST, something struck me: The success ratio (i.e. the ratio between the number of times a rule is violated and the number of opportunities this rule could have been violated) for rules associated to Hibernate was particularly low, indicating issues related to performance and robustness for applications using this framework. … Read More
Would you be so nice as to not tell me the truth?
I recently found myself in yet another endless discussion about how bug fixes and extra capacity impact the results of a Software Analysis and Measurement (SAM) assessment. My interlocutor’s first reaction is that it must be the computing configuration (i.e., the way to turn quality findings into an assessment score, status, etc.) that changed. Fixing bugs or adding extra capabilities won’t have that impact on assessment results. Therefore, keeping the computing configuration stable keeps the results stable. Then, after explaining that finding new or more accurate dependencies would impact the SAM assessment results — thanks to a better understanding of complex behaviors, for instance — my interlocutor reluctantly accepted that … Read More
Efficiency: The Need for Speed and Robustness
In today’s world, we expect everything to run efficiently. People do not have time to lose. One small efficiency improvement, when spread over many users, can lead to massive time and money savings. This also applies to your business applications. How much time would you and your company save if your business applications were more efficient? Probably much more than you think. But, in what forms can efficiency express itself? Well, for starters: Speed How many times have we not been upset by an application that does not start fast enough on our computers or on our smartphones? When a user faces this kind of annoyance, what happens? The company … Read More