Tag: Software Testing

What draws me to Anaheim, Calif., in October is not the walking Disney characters (though there are plenty of those), but instead the STARWest, the West Coast’s largest conference on software testing analysis and review.

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. All one system. All one single application in a nice, neat, tidy package.

While former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld never spoke or wrote about software (as far as I know), his quip about unknown unknowns during the early months of the Iraq war is well known.

No matter what you think of Rumsfeld, his classification applies nicely to software and teaches us a lesson or two about building good software.