Preventing Software Bugs is Challenging But Not Impossible
There’s nothing in this world that is impossible, the word itself says “I’m Possible”. Often we lose hope thinking that we might not be able to achieve something but do you really know what’s the reality behind your failure? The amount and level of effort you make to get the particular goal to achieve as desired. And even if there’s no lack of effort at your end then the luck may not be in your favor.
But we being humans are able to change the world, like we want to, just a little determination and passion is required. The software development industry is such a critical industry to carry out business operations that many new ventures evolve as an aim to conquer the market with their software products but they really forget to add that “X factor” in their software products that meet the user’s expectations. That’s the reason many businesses suffer and a bunch of businesses enjoys their success.
Whenever we talk about meeting user’s expectations in the software development industry, we are generally concerned about the quality of a software product or an app. The highest quality of the software will be, the better the business operations and overall productivity of an organization will be. Now but what actually software quality means? A software that is free of bugs and errors? A software that’s performance is outstanding without any crash or inconvenience? A software that has the ability to keep user’s data safe and secure? If you’ve also thought of these attributes that count to be perfect software, then you are on the right track. To ensure the quality of software products many organizations use defect management tools to track all the errors and glitches in the software to make the product a great fit for the market.
How to prevent software from bugs?
- Test-Driven Development – When trying to prevent or reduce implementation errors in software, test-driven development is one of the most beneficial techniques. For regression errors, TDD is the main way your team can maintain a stable code base throughout the development life cycle. By creating the tests appropriately first and then writing the code that passes those tests, the chance of popping up regression errors is greatly reduced. Test-driven development is another great way for protecting software from bugs that are a result of code smell. TDD encourages development to break out the codebase into the cleaner, separated concerns. It also heavily favors frequent code review and refactoring. Combined, these techniques dramatically reduce the frequency of bugs occurring due to smelly code.
- Continuous integration is a powerful technique that can largely prevent errors caused by insufficient testing. Generally, it will reduce the turnaround time between builds, which will make the overall development and implementation speed better, thereby providing increased hours for testing and quality assurance purposes. Moreover, automation can be implemented for the sake of software testing to implement the use of various tools like bug tracking and bug management tools, etc.
- Good Communication – Errors in the requirement or specification of documents for the development of software products and applications arise because of the lack of communication between the team members that subsequently causes errors and glitches. Whether it is from developer to developer, from manager to developer, from administrative staff to department head, or any other combination of these, lack of communication typically causes malfunctions in the generated specification documents. This may be in the form of a missing part of the specification, or a completely incorrect specification designed to deal with key software components.
- Behavior Driven Development – Another great way to get rid of the errors and vulnerabilities caused by the communication gaps between team members can be solved by incorporating a simple practice i.e BDD (Behavior Driven Development). BDD aims to simplify the software development life-cycle through the use of a general domain-specific language (DSL), that is utilized to adapt natural language sentences and phrases into executable tests.
- Absence of a Proper Plan – It is not a hard and fast rule for you and your team to precisely estimate each specific area that may sum up to be a great threat in the future. However, it is critical to “make a plan” and create a simple and easy procedure through which any team member can outline and record the process of potential problem areas in advance.
Final Words
Software development is not an easy task, it demands extensive care and attention towards its testing process in order to ensure product quality. Organizations must come up with a way out to support their testing needs.
