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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

Quality coach for developers

Vishnu Raned
Monday, October 1, 2007
Vishnu Raned
It is a known fact that applications must change to meet changing business needs. Most software development companies, large or small, face serious schedule risks from these recurring problems:
* Excessive “drag” from existing applications,
* Late discovery of defects, when their repair is most expensive,
* Unpredictable integration and QA cycles that delay application delivery
* Schedules met only through disappointing sacrifices of functionality and quality.

The root cause of these problems is that the code making applications are fragile. Usually just 20 percent of an application’s lifetime cost is in creating it. But useful applications are regularly built from fragile code, making the 80 percent spent in maintenance and enhancement quite painful. It’s easy to release fragile code that works.

The solution could be developer testing also known as unit testing. This is an effective idea that improves time-to-market, quality, and flexibility. The key idea is that each piece of code needs its own tests and the best person to test that code is the developer working on it. Enabling developers to test their code as they write it ensures that quality is built-in from the start. Having unit tests makes it easier to modify the code because the tests document and protect the intended behavior and will instantly catch any regressions.


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