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rss-bridge 2024-10-10T21:33:00+00:00

SE Radio 637: Steve Smith on Software Quality

Steve Smith, founder and principal architect at Nimble Pros, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about software quality. The episode begins with a discussion of why software quality matters for businesses, customers, and developers. Steve explains some patterns and practices that help teams design for quality. They discuss in detail the practices of testing and quality assurance, and the conversation wraps up with suggestions for fostering a culture of quality in teams and organizations. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Steve Smith, founder and principal architect at Nimble Pros, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about software quality. The episode begins with a discussion of why software quality matters for businesses, customers, and developers. Steve explains some patterns and practices that help teams design for quality. They discuss in detail the practices of testing and quality assurance, and the conversation wraps up with suggestions for fostering a culture of quality in teams and organizations. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Show Notes

From IEEE Computer Society

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Transcript

Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society. This transcript was psychometrically generated. To suggest improvements in the text, please contact [email protected] and include the episode number.

Jeff Doolittle 00:00:33 Welcome to Software Engineering Radio. I’m your host Jeff Doolittle. I’m excited to invite Steve Smith as our guest on the show today for a conversation about software quality. Steve is founder and principal architect at Nimble Pros. Steve has over 20 years of experience building custom software solutions using Microsoft technologies and speaks internationally to software developers about ASP.net, domain-driven design, design patterns, solid programming principles, and how to improve quality through refactoring. Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Smith 00:01:04 Hi. Thanks for having me.

Jeff Doolittle 00:01:06 So glad you’re here. I love that your bio mentions quality as something that you’re passionate about, which is exactly what we’re here to talk about today. And so, from a high level, we’re going to talk about how quality relates to design, to testing, to culture and other key aspects of that concept. But I want to start with asking you, why does software quality matter and how did you come to care about it?

Steve Smith 00:01:27 I started caring about software quality because I wanted my software to be correct. I wanted it to work and not have too many bugs. And early on in my career I was building a product and it was an ad server because we had an advertising network of developer websites and I wanted it to work, right? I wanted to serve the ads properly and not crash and not slow down other everybody else’s websites. And so the idea that if there was anything I could do to make it so that it was right the first time and I didn’t have to go rebuild it or revisit it, was very important to me. And we’ll talk about this in a moment I’m sure, but one of the things that I realized very early on is that if you can automate the quality checks of writing automated tests, that’s going to get cheaper and cheaper because of Moore’s law over time. Versus if you have to have manual testing, that’s going to get more and more expensive because developers and even QA personnel tend to be more and more expensive over time. So it just made sense as a business owner for us to focus on that type of building quality in approach.

Jeff Doolittle 00:02:28 Absolutely. So why do you think some people sometimes may be resistant to quality related practices?

Steve Smith 00:02:36 I think mostly it’s the idea that you can go fast and the whole like move fast break things. Thing from the west coast I think has to do with some of that. Like if you move fast and just make a mess, then eventually that’s going to come back to haunt you, right? This whole technical debt metaphor we could talk about where you’ve left this big mess and it’s either going to get in your way or you’re going to have to spend even more time cleaning it up because it’s such a mess than it would have taken to just kind of clean things up as you go. And there’s imagine that instead of building software, you’re like running a kitchen or running a machine shop. Like if you just left a mess everywhere, it would make it much more difficult for you to serve a quality product. And that happens in our industry too.

Jeff Doolittle 00:03:17 Absolutely. So where does quality start in the software development lifecycle in your experience?

Steve Smith 00:03:22 I think it’s important to have a really good idea of what you’re building. Something I like to say is that as software developers we fail in two ways. Either we build the thing wrong or we build the wrong thing. And building the wrong thing is incredibly common and generally more expensive of a mistake than just implementing something incorrectly.

Jeff Doolittle 00:03:41 Absolutely. But as far as where it begins, I mean, are we talking about when you start coding, are we talking about when you start putting issues in the backlog or are you talking about like where does quality actually should it be entering into the minds of people who are building software?

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