SD Best Practices India: Day 1

We're off and running -- from one airport to the next. Which is my way of telling you that Dr. Dobb's SD Best Practices India 2007 is underway.

Scott Meyers capped off a full day of lectures in Hyderabad by speaking to a standing-room-only crowd of architects and developers on the topic of "Better Software: No Matter What." The "no matter what" referred to "no matter what language or platform" you're developing in or for. Scott, you recall, is primarily known for his books and article on C++. By using the "no matter what" tag, he wanted to make sure attendees understood he was talking about better software, not necessarily better C++ software.

That said, part of the focus of Scott's presentation involved static analysis, and the message he wanted to get across was "embrace static analysis". Scott pointed out that the types of problems static analysis can detect include:

• Design violations, such as dependency errors and cyclic dependencies.
• Imissions, e.g., subclass method redefinitions that fail to call superclass definitions.
• Logic errors, e.g. off-by-one or other boundary errors.
• Inefficiencies, e.g., adjacent loops that could be fused.
• Security issues, e.g., failure to validate user input.
• Typos, e.g., if (x + y = z) ...
• Violations of local coding standards, e.g. functions that exceed a complexity metric

Scott then pointed out the advantages of static analysis, including:

• Static analysis is more reliable than debugging and testing.
• Static analysis incurs no runtime cost.

He went on to examine the role of code reviews and testing in the software development lifecycle, noting that reviews can’t replace testing -- they’re complementary.

Other speakers in Day 1 of the conference included Hugh Thompson who spoke on building security into your software, Ken Pugh who discussed managing global and distributed teams, Andrew Stellman who explained what makes open source projects work, Anil Jampala who described the role of the Hyderabad Sofware Exporting Association, Jason Beres who examined agile approaches to building GUIs, Jagdish Babu who described how to maximize application performance in multi-core processors, S.S. Ramakant who showed how to building distributed systems using Visual Studio Team Systems, and Abhishek Mathur who look at VSTS from the perspective of project management.

The Conference continues on January 17 in Chennai, and wraps up in Bangalore on January 19.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 12:35 PM  Permalink