Reflecting on Quality

JULY/AUGUST 2016 | IEEE SOFTWARE 5 MONITORING ROADWORK quality differs completely from actually building roads. When the road is being built, you take samples of materials and test them in a lab. When it’s ready, you use specialized equipment to look for slippery or uneven pavements. And when the road is opened to traf c, you set up cameras and other sensors to see how it’s used. In software engineering, we have it much easier because we can monitor how we build software (the process), the software we build (the product), and the product’s actual use, simply with yet more software. There’s a deep reason why software systems are re ective—why software is used to build and analyze them. Large software systems form the most complex artifacts designed and built by humans. Managing this complexity requires tools of matching capabilities, so these are necessarily also software. Examples include compilers, runtime libraries, version control systems, issue trackers, application servers, and OSs. Without these the modern software industry would grind to a halt.