Software Quality

Last week I finished reading the QA issue of Queue magazine (for those of you who are ACM members or live in the US or Canada this is a great magazine and it's free - go to ACM Queue and check it out). Anyway, the quality issue got me thinking about software quality. For me the main downside of having crappy software (and I have that) is that I have to spend more time in maintenance and on the phone with customers that I do hacking new code.

Anyway reading the QA issue made me think of three main issues to investigate. First, is code coverage. We already try to do unit testing (and even unit testing before implementing the tested code) but I am affraid our test don't really address the real issues. I think code coverage would help us focus our testing effort. I went to the Clover .NET home page to check out a demo and was quite impressed (see the report screen shots at Cenqua). I have not had time to try it on our code, but I indend to do this my first free moment (I am writing some overdue system proposals right now - yuck).

The next thing that I think is cool is code reviews. We are a small group so a code review is someone else reading code and signaling parts that suck. I have a good plugin for eclipse ( Jupiter) but I need something for .NET. I found CodeReview and it seems quite cool. I have a project where we have manditory code review, and I will be trying it out. I would just like something where we could annotate lines and have someone respond to the annotations. I think it will really improve the quality of the code.

There is one final area that I think we can address quality issues. That is using the P4 report tool. This allows us to see the files and project in the SCM that have had the most activity. This should allow us to look at these places for bugs first. I think I have to move all my DHTML to P4 (from PVCS) as soon as possible...