Customer Reviews

Inroads to Software Quality: "How to" Guide and Toolkit

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book originally attracted me for the checklists that are contained in the appendix and for its promise of a new paradigm in software quality assurance. However while reading this book - and I tend to be thorough - I became thoroughly dismayed.

First, this book has all the appearances of not having been reviewed. Basic author craftmanship is not evident. Instances of bad style are common. In many places it becomes somewhat incoherent - sometimes to the point that I could not understand what was intended to be conveyed.

With the exception of the checklists the book's contents fail to live up to expectations.
Sometimes I got the impression, that chapters had been written to make up the page numbers. And I was left wondering whether the author really understood what they were writing. Take for instance the following quote, which is part of a critique on OO technologies:
"Inheritance always causes dependencies! These can be eliminated through fancy footwork, but the question is: 'Why Bother?'"
(You might also ask, what a critique of OO technologies has to do with a book on SW quality, but the authors display a tendency to editorialize).

In other areas the book simply does not deliver at all. Here are some examples:

For instance in the chapter "Techniques For Process Assurance" under the heading "Project Team"(?) the authors provide 7 lines on how important good team selection is but fail to provide any references on how to create them (such as Lister and DeMarco's Peopleware). A project team has nothing to do with techniques and the authors would have done better to remove the topic rather than try to cover such a complex area in 7 lines.

Likewise the chapter "Software Quality Assurance Reviews" sounds like a copy of the IEEE standards. But no information is given how to make these reviews actually work.

The entries in the bibliographic reference section give the impression of not having been carefully selected. The above mentioned area on reviews and inspections fails to mention Gilb's book on inspections and only refers to a publication by Fagan on this topic.

In two of the appendices, several pages of text are repeated word for word. The proof reader must have fallen asleep.

The authors proclaim their product delivery process is a 'new paradigm.' After having read the book I cannot see a new paradigm (apart from the misuse of the term). What is new in checklists? - many companies have them because they are very effective. What is new in market oriented reviews?

My overall impression is that the authors have a good collection of checklists, that they wanted to turn into a book. It appears to me that they then added, seemingly at random, more information to it to make up the volumne. The result backfires badly, because it turned a decent nucleus into a book that I find not worth buying.

In fact, this is the first time in my life I have returned a book to the vendor.

Every time you buy a book that relates to quality you find the same ideas, interesting but how to carry them out? This book will help you to build a quality system that fits your organization. Good exaplantion about use of checklists, testing, and a new software quality paradigm.

This is a must book for those who continuously find the same defects from release to release. The New Paradigm gives the readers the concepts and implementation of "filters" that prevents defects from going further in the development cycle. This book is not about software testing or reviews but about Software Quality Assurance . It has overall concepts on the product assurance and process assurance activities that increases the robustness of a product. There are several books in the market on the subjects of inspections and testing. After reviewing several books, I found this is the only book that has taken the Deming principle of "defect containment" and shown the readers the effectiveness of the processes, if implemented correctly.

Basic concept of book is that 'quality cannot be inspected in, it must be build in'. I did come away with some new ideas and some interesting points. However, I frequently found the book to be off the main theme.

Excellent book with lots of templates and easy to understand text. Authors have done a great job.

Book has lots of templates which are easy to use. The book is extremely practical and a "MUST" have for every software engineer.