Chapter 1. The Case for Software Quality

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Arthur C. Clarke

The Magic of Software

The above quote from the famous British futurist and author of the 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey is cited in many fields but is probably more relevant to the magic of software than any other single invention. Consider

• That in 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson described the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) as a double-helix structure and thus began a scientific pursuit of the Promethean power of genetics. But unraveling the sheer volume and complexity of the genetic information contained in DNA was a computational problem far ahead of its time. It was the ...

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