quality
tales
Debugging software in virtual environments
Imagine you are developing the software of a complex cyber-physical system, e.g. laboratory automation system, industrial robot, etc. To manage complexity, you might develop the software in a
Guided Backpropagation with PyTorch and TensorFlow
We learned previously on the xAI blog series how to access the gradients of a class probability with respect to the input image. With that, we got a
Software quality monitoring: Real use case
Let’s continue unfolding the story of software quality monitoring on a real project.In the previous post, we saw that the price of setting up a quality assessment process
Measuring software quality: Start in just one day
We have been talking about monitoring and measuring software quality in several posts now: from its origins, to its benefits for the whole team. All of this is
Explainable AI: How to implement saliency maps
What is the problem with AI/deep learning algorithms? They don’t like to tell us in a human-understandable way what they are doing! Here comes explainable AI (xAI) to
Testing AI-based systems
AI-based systems are becoming popular. However, the broad acceptance of such systems is still quite low in our society. Trust in and acceptance of AI-based systems will significantly
System testing in virtual environments
When it comes to system level testing, virtual environments offer several strong benefits for you. In this blog post, I want to highlight some of the most important
UAM Testing – Software success for Urban Air Mobility
Have you had your coffee today? Then you should be ready for a quick quiz … Question: “What will Uber, Lyft, aircraft and helicopters soon all have in
Software quality analysis: Chart.js version 3.5.0
What is it? Chart.js is part of the Front End development family.This popular JavaScript library makes data visualization work much easier and has been evolving since 2013. With
DO-178C and OWASP in avionics app testing
My post series is explaining what tests should be applied to an avionics app – in my example to simulate the Instrument Landing System (ILS). What is necessary
Continuous integration: Building the ultimate CI pipeline
Software is traditionally designed, coded, then tested. However, poor quality coding and a testing phase at the end of the process can add a significant amount of time
Monitoring the fuzz target – Revenge of the Bug
Bugs! The fuzz target is crumbling under endless waves of fuzz values sent by the ruthless fuzzers. There are monitoring options on both sides. Potential bugs are everywhere.
Security and safety requirements to test an app connected to avionics
In a previous article I responded to the question Why test an app that is connected to avionics? In this second part, I will talk about a test
Artificial Intelligence in safety-critical: Are hopes “real” or “artificial”?
Engineers love acronyms but normally need the words spelled out … Not so with A.I. Any mention of “A.I.” elicits excitement, but also myriad hopes and fears for
Measuring and monitoring technical debt
The technical debt concept has been around for some time now. We can find it in international conferences, in scientific articles, books, and even here at Coders Kitchen.
Why test an app that is connected to avionics?
Hello World, this is the first of a series of three articles explaining how to test a secure and safe app connected to avionics. Avionics modules… What are
Software quality analysis: Laravel version 8.16.0
What is it? Laravel is part of the Web Framework family.Its official website describes it as “a web application framework with an expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development
Improving test efficiency
Effective software teams are always looking for ways to make their members more efficient. They realize that improving the development process is an good way to improve quality
Recipe for a successful software demo
Software demos are an essential part of a balanced and healthy product development cycle. From internally unveiling a new proof-of-concept to collecting feedback from external stakeholders, software demos
Fuzz target – Attack of the Fuzzers
There is unrest in the testing community. Several thousand fuzz test values have declared their intentions to attack the fuzz target software. But how do we get the
Software quality analysis: Keras version 2.4.0
What is it? Keras is part of the Artificial Intelligence family. Its official website describes it as “an API designed for human beings, not machines. Keras follows best
Debugging without security risks
Security researcher Michael Myng found the keylogging code in software drivers that were preinstalled on HP laptops to make the keyboard work. He discovered the keylogger code during
Software quality for the team: You talkin’ to me?
Software quality monitoring has many dimensions: the quality of data produce a deep landscape to explore, and passing time gives it additional meaning. But there’s something missing in
Cost of fixing vs. preventing bugs
When you think about improving software quality, your initial thoughts might be the cost of investing in new tools and engineering labor to implement them. You may also
Can debug code cause security vulnerabilities?
As software continues to eat the world, failures caused by bugs have never been more visible or higher profile. These bugs can result in delays in shipping software
Fuzzing techniques – The Generator Menace
Turmoil has engulfed the Coders Kitchen. Right now, we will have our first post about How Fuzz Testing or Fuzzing is establishing itself as the number one technique
A simple error: Safety, security or both?
Aside from safety properties, can we use static analysis tools to detect security issues? Yes, as we will show by discussing a programming error in uftpd, an ftp server
Software quality temporal monitoring: Back in time
Let’s continue our exploration: by monitoring software quality with a tool, you should benefit from the big quality concepts without the headaches. As we saw already, we have
Isolate, Verify and Merge
The cost of fixing software is well understood. Much research has been done to demonstrate that fixing defects at the time of introducing them is significantly cheaper than
A guide on how to choose and use testing techniques
“When am I to use which testing technique?”. This is the question we will be exploring in this blog post. Our focus lies on unit tests, mostly done
Automated security testing with Fuzzing – The Prequel
Fuzz Testing or Fuzzing is establishing itself as the number one technique for highly automated software testing and is the favorite tool of security researchers and hackers alike,
Quality assurance for safety-critical vs. non-safety-critical
Quality Assurance (“QA”) is arguably the most critical aspect of safety-critical software. However, QA is rarely given the attention or credit befitting its crucial role. Consider the following
Monitoring software quality: I have a good feeling about this
So far, we have explored several aspects of software quality, and listed qualities of a good software quality monitoring solution. Such an exciting topic is bound to trigger
Evaluating embedded software test automation tools
The software test automation tools market is full of solutions that all claim to do the same thing: automate software testing. Wikipedia lists over 100 test framework tools
Overall software quality: We’re gonna need bigger data
In our previous post on silos, we focused on code and tests, and hinted at development-centric quality indicators. True to our “big picture” approach, let’s take a step
Visual testing of a Unity-based 3D world
We provide a 3D animation environment for the development and testing of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles. Developing and maintaining this environment is a complex
Convincing reasons to adopt code coverage tools
Developers need to be able to analyze the “completeness” of their system testing and ensure applications aren’t released with untested code. Thanks to code coverage tools, developers have
Break data silos, don’t get lost in translation
Let’s continue exploring what we need to efficiently monitor software quality: in the previous post we saw that we need the big picture as well as the little
Requirements in Agile development processes
The Standish Report tells that in 1994 ninety-one per cent (91%) of software projects failed, with thirty per cent (30%) ultimately cancelled. In 2020, 26 years later, seventy-one
Inside software quality: Big picture and little details
In our previous six part series, we explored software quality, from concepts to benefits as a part of the development process. Now, what if we were to build
How to guide end users with purposeful error messaging
What did I do wrong and how can I fix it? When an error is encountered during the use of software, this is what the user wants to
A single source of truth
Software projects produce lots of artifacts over time, obviously the source code, but also requirement and design docs, test cases, bug reports, CI scripts, installation scripts, and a
Software quality is not a myth: Real examples
As this is the last part of our software quality introduction series, it is time to look at some real examples. From its concept to the quality-fluent team,
Prevent “quality deficit” in your software
What’s the software quality deficit gap? It’s the time taken to evolve a product from initial release until perceived as being of good quality. It is variable depending
The safe & secure software factory
“Companies that embrace the principles of Software Factory (DevOps) experience 60 times fewer failures and can deploy 30 times faster than organisations that don’t follow these principles.” State
Software quality: Winning as a team
We have exposed a nice framework in previous posts: raw data produce metrics and indicators, and a rating model evaluates quality for each project component. This can become
How to craft GDPR compliant software
Six leading principles to follow for GDPR compliance. In our former post, we saw that General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a world in itself. To help you
Software quality rating model
In our previous post, we discussed objectives, metrics and indicators, as powerful concepts to finely assess multiple aspects of software quality (SQ).Using new concepts to deal with a
Software Code of Ethics: Respect the privacy of your users
In this post we will look at how the new GDPR regulation meets the 3.12 principle of the Software Engineering Code of Ethics: “Work to develop software and
Illuminating system integration
System integration no matter the approach; modular, big bang, regressive, controlled or adhoc can often be one of the most critical phases of a project. This is often
The nature of software development
I’ve been writing a lot of code over the last 4-5 months, prototyping some new product ideas. Here are some thoughts that I try to keep in mind
What hardware manufacturing can teach software development
We all have experienced the growing impact of software in our lives. We are doing more in software development with each application we build, as the below chart
Software quality powers explained
Let’s continue our journey across the software quality (SQ) landscape, as we learned it has the power to improve our code, even ourselves. And it is now time
How to make your developers happy
There’s no shortage of articles on how to improve software quality via process improvement. Today I want to look at things from the other side, from the software
Software quality: To the rescue!
In this post we’ll show what a healthy relationship with code quality looks like. After our introductory post, software quality (‘SQ’ for friends) might seem intimidating, maybe even
How to test like Google using test automation
In the book How Google Tests Software – Help me test like Google, the authors describe how bugs resulting from incomplete testing are one of the biggest barriers
How SpaceX develops software
SpaceX, a pioneer in commercial space transportation, most recently successfully took Astronauts to the space station with their Crew Dragon launch vehicle. SpaceX have essentially gone from a blank sheet of paper and text
Software quality: Origin story
Software quality is a vast field, which has been the subject of many studies, standards and tools for a long time (if we think in “Software time”). To
Maintaining software: What’s your team working on today?
A few years ago I read: “The Phoenix Project” which is a novel about the IT group at a fictional company that’s struggling with maintaining and enhancing their
Clone spotting: Find code clones with their DNA
Unidentical twins Code clones can be elusive. First of all, we’re not talking about the dumb copy/paste textual clones, we’re interested in the harder to see algorithmic kind
Hippocratic Oath for developers: Software engineering code of ethics
The software engineering code of ethics Written in antiquity, the Hippocratic Oath is held sacred by physicians, who continue today to swear that they will uphold its principles
How do we measure the value of testing?
I was asked recently if the number of bugs found is the best measure of the value of testing. Honestly, I had to think about this for a
How to develop high-quality software
What if we take an approach to software development that would significantly improve software quality? As you begin to design a system, think about how to make “manufacturing”
Anatomy of a source code
To bit or not to bit? Source code is present in pretty much everything we interact with today: phone apps, vehicle GPS, aircraft multimedia or flight controls, technological
Technical debt in the world of Internet of Things / IoT
Software used to be seen as something that could be written once and used many times without ever “breaking down.” However, that illusion faded when problems began to
Tear down the silos for faster time-to-market
One of the challenges that all software development groups face is the trade-off between time-to-market and adding new features. Software is so malleable that it is tempting to
All code clones are not equal
Like clones from a famous galactic franchise, source code clones can be dangerous if you let them multiply: They carry bugs, which then also multiply. Clones artificially inflate
Hey, what’s cooking?
At Vector, we’ve been developing software for 30 years. In an environment where faulty or low quality software can cause critical damage. To continuously deliver on software quality,