The Human Factor in Software Engineering

Best of Software Quality Days SQD
The SQD took place on January 17 to 20 in Vienna. At this rather practice oriented conference, Best Practices and experiences are exchanged. I myself organized a workshop about ethical decisions in software engineering on 20th January.

I liked these two presentations most because they provided really new and useful insights:

• The two presentations of Jürgen and Pagano about Test Gap Analysis:
  "Haben wir das Richtige getestet? Erfahrungen mit Test-Gap-Analyse im Hotfix-Test, Iterationstest und Releasetest in der Praxis" and "Oh nein, morgen ist Release! - Test-Gap-Analyse live am Beispiel".
  Test Gap Analysis is the visualization of two different aspects of the same software as a tree map: The information, which code lines have been modified, and which code lines have been executed during testing. Especially critical are those code lines which have been modified but not tested. Like this, testing need becomes evident. This visualization is generated by the tool TeamScale which still is in its pilot phase and can still be tested for free. The slides of the first presentation including tool screenshots are provided by the authors here.
• And another presentation of Sneed about the COBOL Java migration: Harry M. Sneed, Chris Verhoef: Validating converted Java Code via Symbolic Execution.
  How do you find out that the Java code behaves exactly like the COBOL code? In the ideal case, it has been restructured during migration. In my lecture, I teach that it is impossible to compare two computer programs whether they do the same. The theoretical informatics can prove this. Sneed nevertheless managed to solve the problem: He compares the control flows and data flows of bothe programs by symbolic execution.