Software Engineering Practices and Tools – Now or Never

Recently, I was browsing through Google Video. There was an interesting presentation on Static Analysis. The speaker was a researcher and talked on the importance of Static Analysis. I have been using few open source tools like Findbugs, PMD, Checkstyle and Cobertura. I should confess honestly that I have not been using them by heart but as a process. These are more a sort of personal process. I should also admit that I did not get a real understanding of the tools usage. I am not going to blame myself because we did not live in the world of true parallelism. A couple of years back, a true parallelism is above layman’s reach. Only the high end users and top enterprises use true parallelism.

There were two parallelisms possible in the past. They were super scalability and instruction pipelining. I lost tracking the advancements in hardware industry as the growth was tremendous (I too do not have competency to track the developments). Until recently, we were living in the age of true fastness. In 1990 a C program might have run in 10 nanoseconds but in the year 2000 the same C program might have run in 5 nanoseconds. No multiprocessing or multithreading. The reason is the hardware manufacturers were able to achieve fastness in clock frequency. Simply, there were able to execute more instructions per second sequentially. Nowadays, in each physical processor we have many logical processors. Each logical processor runs in parallel. The process of sequential execution is fading away. We are forced to learn multithreading to tap the advantage of multi-cores. As human we are not so much used to concurrency and that’s our limitation.

In older days, the computers are meant for geeks. But Java, Web 2.0 and Web technologies gave a lead to computers. With these infrastructures, now a layman can explore the power of Internet. We cannot imagine a day in this planet without the Internet – Mails, Blogging, Community Software and, Messengers. The world has become a virtual family. A computer Engineer will handle Software in a different way than a layman. The software that is being developed should be easy to use and reliable. How can you achieve reliability? How will you study functionality in detail without tools?

With wide deployment of Software, Software security is gaining momentum. It was “ok” to leave vulnerabilities in the past but today within 15 minutes of your software release, the applications are being hacked. A couple of years back, a Honeypot was deployed in the Internet. Within 15 minutes, an attacker took over the honeypot. But the Honeypot was protected enough so that the attacker was locked inside. So writing secured software is going to get harder and harder.

In order address the issues from all sides, the fundamental characters have to strong. Software Engineering practices and following the practices by heart is need for the hour. Use of tools helps us to uncover most of the low hanging issues that may go undetected in the final product. Matured Software Engineering practices together with tools can improve the quality and productivity. You will release software with fewer bugs in lesser duration. In the future, big companies are going to survive. But the companies which follow the practices by heart are going to become big companies.

Your managers are not responsible if you do not follow processes or use tools. Now it is time for a paradigm shift. Now or Never.