Java Magazine, Jan/Feb 2016
ORACLE COM JAVAMAGAZINE JANUARY FEBRUARY 2016 06 letters to the editor More JavaFX and Introductory Articles Java Magazine used to run articles for developers new to Java in every issue In addition there were occasional articles on JavaFX Is it possible to continue publishing such articles Marius Claassen Editor Andrew Binstock responds Thanks for your note Readers suggestions about what to cover more frequently are very helpful to us We will be resuming the beginner series in the next issue and it should become a regular feature Michael Kölling the author of the previous series on introductory topics will be the author His focus will be on language features especially the dark corners where unexpected or unusual behaviors are found You might have seen in the September October issue that we covered TestFX a way of testing JavaFX apps And we do have a couple of additional JavaFX articles in the pipeline If we see an increase in demand for JavaFX articles we will cover the topic even more How Effective Is Static Analysis Thank you for your editorial on the value of static analysis The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Static Analysis September October 2015 issue page 3 You were kind enough to quote some of the statistics I published earlier Let me make some comments and add some more information Static analysis is among the most effective forms of defect removal and also fairly inexpensive and fairly rapid It can be used for both development and also for removing latent bugs in legacy applications As you pointed out false positives are much lower today than they were 10 years ago I think static analysis should become a standard software quality method that is used on just about 100 percent of all software applications with one caveat the tool is simply not available for many languages except the 30 or so most popular ones However its effectiveness is undeniable Table 1 shows the approximate defect removal eficiency DRE values for a sample of pretest removal and for test stages The DRE metric was developed by IBM circa 1973 as a tool for validating the effectiveness of inspections It is a simple metric If developers find 90 bugs and a customer reports 10 bugs in the first three months of use then the DRE would be 90 percent The current US average for DRE is about 92 percent but top projects can get up to 995 percent This average value is based on both pretest removal and the six normal test stages used SEPTEMBER OCTOBER 2015 TECHNIQUE DEFECT REMOVAL RATE FORMAL INSPECTIONS 87 STATIC ANALYSIS 55 EXTERNAL BETA TEST 1000 CLIENTS 52 SYSTEM TEST CERTIFIED TESTERS 46 INFORMAL PEER REVIEWS 45 SYSTEM TEST UNCERTIFIED 36 DEVELOPERS FUNCTION TEST 35 COMPONENT TEST 32 UNIT TEST 30 EXTERNAL BETA TEST 1000 28 CLIENTS DESK CHECK 27 PAIR PROGRAMMING 22 ACCEPTANCE TEST 17 REGRESSION TEST 14 PERFORMANCE TEST 12 Table 1 Defect removal efficiency in descending order for pretest and test techniques
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