How to Build Better Software

Writing good, reliable software is hard work. That was true when Frederick Brooks published his seminal book, The Mythical Man-Month, in 1975, and it was still the case by the time Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming In Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software, was released in 2007. In fact, many aspects of the coding and design process had stayed the same from one generation to the next (my conversation with Rosenberg can be found here. But progress is being made, says Mukesh Sharma, CEO of QA InfoTech Worldwide, a quality assurance firm. “Companies have had to dramatically change their approach to quality to create the more usable and higher quality products that consumers are now demanding,” says Sharma. He’s got an obvious interest in talking up the value of quality assurance, but we think his point is unassailable, as we’ve mentioned a few times before (see also: Glitch-Free Software, Better Software Development). As the old saying goes, Measure twice and cut once. Here is QA’s list of trends in software quality.