This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Michael Cote. Original Post: More QA for More Complex Software Feed Title: Cote's Weblog: Coding, Austin, etc. Feed URL: https://cote.io/feed/ Feed Description: Using Java to get to the ideal state. Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Michael Cote Latest Posts From Cote's Weblog: Coding, Austin, etc.

"[T]raditional messages verifying software have petered out because they don't work very well at today's complexity scales. What does work is having a lot of people look at the source code. It's really that simple. Secrecy is the enemy of quality. And the open-source movement and its allies in industry are the people who have learned the converse of that statement, which is that peer review is the best friend of quality."
(From an Eric Raymond conference call with Prudential Securities.)

This is similar to an argument made in Adam Barr's Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters that the role of QA in the software process is greatly undervalues and will increasingly become more important. In the Raymond version, above, actual coders are QA'ing not only for proper execution of the software, but also the code itself. Doing both, of course, seems better but, it's probably only possible for insanly rich companies with small products or open source products where people will work for free.

As a tangent into my current pet-topic, the same line of argument could be used for the peer review that social software helps enable: more people looking at information potentially allows for better QA'ing, and use, of that info.

There are other well-phrased comments as well, e.g.,

When you ask, how do you manage open-source software, I'll continue that thread by saying that you manage it rationally the same way you manage closed-source software, which is to accept that you can set one of two things. You can either prioritize features and set a ship date and say, we'll take the features that are done by this ship date, or you can say, this is a set of features that I need, wake me when it's done. And open-source and closed-source software rationally are both managed by the same rule, which is: pick one of those.