Does you code have integrity?

Eli Lopian    Code Integrity, Unit Tests    

I have been talking about integrity management, but the word integrity actually comes from the technical condition of being whole. That is why in star trak we hear that the Enterprise’s hull integrity is failing. The ship is not complete. When a car leaves the manufacturing company, it gets stamped 100% integrity, meaning that it is complete.

So what is your code integrity?

Your code is whole if it does what it supposed to do. It doesn’t mean that the client finds it useful or that it is easy to use, but it does mean that if the developer meant for the code to do something, that it actually does it.

Probably the best way to insure code integrity is to have a set of tests that the developer can run to make sure that his code has integrity.

So how would we measure code integrity?

I think that the number of test, test density and code coverage are not sufficient. They don’t really tell us of the effectiveness of the tests, so we don’t know the level of our code integrity. I am debating this, I am not so sure.

How would you measure your code integrity?

Zune Meltdown as a Management Problem

Eli Lopian    Management for Geeks, Unit Tests    

Ester Schindler has a post in cio about the 3 lessons developers should learn from the Zune meltdown. She finishes it with:

Quality Assurance doesn’t apply only to fixing code. It applies to fixing broken application development processes, whether it’s because Quality Assurance departments aren’t given the respect and resources they deserve or because developers leave it to QA to find every problem rather than bearing personal responsibility for their own code…
As one correspondent noted, "It may have been a development problem or a requirements problem. Such things are always, ultimately, management problems."

This is something that I can really relate to: The problem is a  management problem!

Management needs to focus on quality in the development process. Using the correct tools, it is easy and cheaper then expected.
As bugs are cheaper to find earlier in the process, Unit Testing is the cheapest way to add this kind of quality and responsibility.

Many development teams are understanding this and joining the unit testing trend.