Chapter 25. Where Do Most Software Flaws Come From?

Dewayne Perry

The holy grail of software development management is “cheaper, faster, and better.” Unfortunately, a lot of poor management decisions are made in pursuit of this grail. While “cheaper and faster” are often very important, “better” clearly is the most important in a wide variety of software systems where reliability or safety is of paramount importance.

There are a variety of different ways in which a product can be made better, ranging from more clearly understanding customer needs to minimizing faults in the software system. It is the latter that is the focus of this chapter. Only by understanding the mistakes we make can we determine what remedies need to be applied to improve either the products or the processes. Monitoring faults is a relatively simple matter, either as they are found or in project retrospectives (often referred to as “project post-mortems”).

A fundamental aspect in minimizing faults in software systems is the managing of complexity, the most critical of essential characteristics of software systems [Brooks 1995]. One of the most useful techniques in managing that complexity is that of separating the interfaces of components from their implementations. It is because of this critical technique that the difference between interface and implementation faults is an important distinction that is addressed in this chapter.

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