Category: essays

Ideas for better quality software

Ideas for better quality software

I’ve been around long enough to see many different efforts to improve software quality fail. Often the ideas are fairly one-dimensional rather than wholistic. I’ll give you one example.

Let’s say there’s a decision that everyone must use continuous integration in the next release. Even if it’s not sold as a panacea, there seems to be an implication that it’ll definitely lead to significantly improved quality. And it’s not to say that it couldn’t. But the problem is that for continuous integration to be very successful, it requires other things like good development practices and perhaps a suite of unit tests.

Having said all this, many could be done in isolation.

Better source code management practices

Most of this revolves around source code management. A common way to use tools like git is to do the following:

  • Branch for a bug fix
  • Branch for feature work
  • Branch for releases as
…

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My hierarchy of testing

My hierarchy of testing

This comes from a long career in software testing where I went through more than a dozen full release cycles

I’ve executed and observed 5 major types of testing, seen the bugs they catch, and seen the overall quality of projects that rely on different types of testing. I don’t have objective data to back any of this up, so this is purely my subjective observations. After you read this, you’ll see that I value the subjective very highly in testing despite the fact that pretty charts and graphs can be compelling.

I think this is important because everyone has scarce testing resources and needs to get the best bang for the buck. Many companies invert their emphasis and I think that goes a long way to explaining why much of the software out there is poor quality.

So, here are what I see as the five types, in order …

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Why does rebooting fix everything?

Why does rebooting fix everything?

This comes from a long career of software testing where I went through more than a dozen release cycles, noting which testing methods work best.

We’re all familar with the following troubleshooting steps when encountering a problem on our computers or phones:

  • Quit and relaunch an app if that’s where the problem lies
  • Log out and log back in (on a Mac)
  • Reboot

In fact, it’s often the first thing many people try. And for me, I reboot all my devices every morning.

More often than not, the problem goes away. Why is that? Well, a few possible things can explain it:

  • Sometimes caches can be cleared on reboot that were causing problems
  • Sometimes background processes were running that were affecting an app you were running
  • The overall system became constrained for resources and rebooting starts everything from scratch

But I’d offer another explanation: It’s because of how software …

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How to use dogfood testing

How to use dogfood testing

A number of companies use the word dogfood testing to describe part of their software testing process. I believe it’s a powerful and essential part of testing as I mention in My hierarchy of testing. However, it means different things to different people, so I wanted to describe how I think it should be used to make the most of it.

As great as QA engineers can be, it’s sometimes impossible to cover the breadth of a product and ensure high quality. Dogfood testing is the practice of installing reasonably current builds of a product on your own device(s) and living on them. Everyone has their own unique way of using their devices so it can be a great way to tease out bugs that otherwise would be very difficult to find. Historically, many of the most important bugs I’ve seen have come out of this process.

An …

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Common software usability issues

Common software usability issues

This is based on working in the software world for quite some time, ranging from technical support to consulting to quality assurance to software engineering. And from observing people at every chance I get. While some things improve in software, some pesky things stay the same and repeat themselves whenever a new application is created.

Here’s my list of things that I think most software needs to get better at doing. Most of the examples will involve tapping on a touchscreen device, but are often applicable to clicking with a mouse or trackpad. They are in no particular order.

Tap tolerance

You may be uncoordinated, elderly, or an a train when you tap on your screen. Your finger may shift a bit when you tap just because that’s how your body works. There is typically a threshold of movement after which the tap is registered as gesture rather than a …

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