The Hindu Business Line : Quality Guru offers tips for code-writers

JUST imagine a surgeon operating human beings without knowing the nuances of human anatomy. This is the same analogy that fits to current day software code-writers without process expertise, often making mistakes in codes.

Mr Watts Humphrey, who has over 50 years of software skills, and referred to as a Quality Guru, is in India, familiarising the software community on the need to adopt new processes that could help them enhance their productivity as a team.

He notes that often software writers are engaged in their own work neglecting processes and contributing to defects.

To address this, Mr Humphrey, the inventor of Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for the software processes, along with Carnegie Mellon University, is meeting team leaders to impress upon the need for new standards in terms of PSP or Personal Software Process and TSP or Team Software Process.

He said these processes foster skills, discipline and commitment required for successful software projects both at individual capacity and at a team level.

Basically, these processes draw inspiration from the engineering stream, where every methodology is documented, so that a design does not have to re-invent the wheel.

Currently, the software industry is losing around one and a half days of bug-fixing effort for every defect and due to their imperfect practices they inject on an average 25 to 50 defects per 1,000 lines of codes.

This leads to loss of about 60 man-days for just 1,000 lines of code. So when in a product typically anywhere between 50,000 lines of codes to a million are written, the wastage is mind-boggling.

The defects that cause this loss are indeed due to bad practices of the developers who work as individuals, he said.

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