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Writing Solid Code Week 4
This week most of the students in the class (but not everyone, since we ran out of time) presented their arguments about the quality of various UNIX utility programs. This was a bit more interesting than it might otherwise have been since some of the utilities running on our student lab machines are hilariously old…
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Automatically Entering the Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition
G++ can be comically verbose; developers sometimes like to wallpaper their cubes with choice error messages from Boost or STL programs. The Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition asks the question: how large can we make the ratio between error output and compiler input? I’m not much of a C++ person but when the contest was…
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Writing Solid Code Week 3
This week we finished up the triangle classifier. Not all students’ implementations pass all test cases, which is totally fine with me as long as people learned some lessons about when not to use floating point (I did). On Tuesday we also chose a smallish UNIX utility for each student to evaluate as if it…
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Status of Software Testing
The other day I received a query from some software engineering researchers who are compiling sort of a survey paper about the status of software testing research; here are the questions, with my answers. I’m interested to hear what the rest of you think about this stuff. What do you think are the most significant…
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Writing Solid Code Week 2
First, I wanted to thank everyone for the great discussion on the post about week 1. My single favorite thing about blogging is the discussion and involvement that these posts sometimes generate. During week 2 we worked on issues relating to the triangle classifier. As several commenters predicted, getting correct results using floating point code…
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Writing Solid Code Week 1
This semester I’m teaching a new undergraduate course called Writing Solid Code. The idea is to take a lot of lessons I’ve learned on this subject — testing, debugging, defensive coding, code reviews, etc. — and try to teach it. Since I don’t have any slides or even any lecture notes that are good enough…