Developers fast to fix open-source bugs

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In addition, RhinoData,...

...the program scans for 'errors' in the code, not 'errors' in the applications.

A piece of code may contain certain 'coding errors' that have no effect on the performance of an application but may possibly one day be found to allow certain possibly predictable behaviors in some app that may have possibly used that code that may possibly be used to do some possible harm under some possible conditions that may possibly be reproduced.

In an example, there may be a function in app1 that should accept two integers and return a boolean. The function may not do datatype checking on the parameters. The bits of the parameters may be interpreted as integers even though they are floats. No problem. The function still returns a boolean. How wrong can a True/False response be to, "is X greater than Y?" Certainly cannot crash a program that only passes integers to the function?

But if the code is re-used in some other application where True/False is the difference between life and death, it would be good for that programmer to get some error handling that says, "Illegal float parameter in function: integer expected," so that he can realise that he needs to typecast his previous output before sending it to this function. Hence the lack of datatype checking is a 'coding error' but not necessarily an application bug if your app always passes two integers to the function.

Finding 'coding errors' does not necessarily reflect on the quality of the application --crappy coding can produce great apps and excellent coding can produce crappy apps-- but it does reflect on the quality of the coders. I beleive that a previous article listed the commercial software industry average to be 5 coding errors per 1,000 lines of code --please correct me if I am wrong. (I believe that it was stated as 5,000 errors per 1,000,000 lines of code). Even the worst of the lot at 1.2 per thousand was far better than the commercial industry average.

This reflects well on the "many eyes" theory of better coding.

Posted by: The King's Servant   Posted on: 04/06/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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