QualityDev.net

Last week I attended the CodeMash conference in Sandusky, OH, which included a list of impressive speakers giving some excellent sessions.Neal Ford’s keynote “Engineering & Polyglot Programming” discussed how we describe our profession to non-technical people (family, friends, people in the public who ask what you do….).

Ford explained how most of us use the (much despised) engineering metaphor; specifically using the example of building bridges, then went on to clarify that software development is not like traditional engineering at all.

This got me thinking (yet again) about whether software development is an art or science. So I caught up with Neal and Stelligent president (and author of The Disco Blog) Andy Glover, and asked them their opinion on the issue.

Unit Testing is one of our passions, and a natural extension to this is Code Coverage measurement. Tools such as Cobertura (Open Source) and Clover have been around for many years, and are gaining popularity in many teams I visit. Recently, there have been a few blogs commenting on the benefits and potential pitfalls of using this type of tool.