The aura of software quality

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Bad money drives out good money, is a financial adage. The corresponding research adage might be “research hyperbole incentivizes more hyperbole”.

Software quality appears to be the most commonly studied problem in software engineering. The reason for this is that use of the term software quality imbues what is said with an aura of relevance; all that is needed is a willingness to assert that some measured attribute is a metric for software quality.

Using the term “software quality” to appear relevant is not limited to researchers; consultants, tool vendors and marketers are equally willing to attach “software quality” to whatever they are selling.

When reading a research paper, I usually hit the delete button as soon as the authors start talking about software quality. I get very irritated when what looks like an interesting paper starts spewing “software quality” nonsense.

The paper: A Family of Experiments on Test-Driven Development commits the ‘crime’ of framing what looks like an interesting experiment in terms of software quality. Because it looked interesting, and the data was available, I endured 12 pages of software quality marketing nonsense to find out how the authors had defined this term (the percentage of tests passed), and get to the point where I could start learning about the experiments.

While the experiments were interesting, a multi-site effort and just the kind of thing others should be doing, the results were hardly earth-shattering (the experimental setup was dictated by the practicalities of obtaining the data). I understand why the authors felt the need for some hyperbole (but 12-pages). I hope they continue with this work (with less hyperbole).

Anybody skimming the software engineering research literature will be dazed by the number and range of factors appearing to play a major role in software quality. Once they realize that “software quality” is actually a meaningless marketing term, they are back to knowing nothing. Every paper has to be read to figure out what definition is being used for “software quality”; reading a paper’s abstract does not provide the needed information. This is a nightmare for anybody seeking some understanding of what is known about software engineering.

When writing my evidence-based software engineering book I was very careful to stay away from the term “software quality” (one paper on perceptions of software product quality is discussed, and there are around 35 occurrences of the word “quality”).

People in industry are very interested in software quality, and sometimes they have the confusing experience of talking to me about it. My first response, on being asked about software quality, is to ask what the questioner means by software quality. After letting them fumble around for 10 seconds or so, trying to articulate an answer, I offer several possibilities (which they are often not happy with). Then I explain how “software quality” is a meaningless marketing term. This leaves them confused and unhappy. People have a yearning for software quality which makes them easy prey for the snake-oil salesmen.

Main memory: the crucial component that vendors don’t mention

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

CPU performance hogs the limelight when people discuss the year-on-year increases in computing power that used to occur.

This focus on cpu performance was/is driven by marketing, the people with the money either don’t want customers thinking about the performance impact of main memory size or speed, or want them to treat the processor as the most important component of a computer. Vendors want processor performance to drive customer purchase decisions.

Hardware manufacturers used to entice new customers with low cost machines, containing minimal memory. Once a customer started to use their shiny new computer, they found that it did save them lots of time and money, but also they needed more memory (which could only be brought from the manufacturer and was not cheap).

The plot below shows the prices IBM charged for System 360s, in 1966. Anti-trust investigations uncover all kinds of interesting data, like selling low-spec equipment at a loss to entice customers and make life difficult for competitors (code+data for all plots).

Profit margin on IBM 360s sold with various memory sizes

The plot below (data from the 19 Aug 1985 issue of ComputerWorld) shows how the price of computers increased as the minimum about of memory they supported increased.

Yes, in 1985 top end computers came with over 50M of memory; but most customers thought themselves lucky if they had a few megabytes.

If the processor is slow, it just takes longer for programs to run. If the computer does not have enough memory, programs cannot run. For most applications memory requirements are addressed first, followed by processor performance; memory requirements is the number one issue. The optimizations that commercial compilers could perform were limited by the memory capacity of developer machines.

List price of computers, in 1985, supporting the given minimum amount of  memory

Intel’s main line of business used to be selling memory chips, but these chips became commodity items as more companies entered the market; Intel bet the farm on selling processors and the rest is history. As a seller of a unique product it was/is in Intel’s interest to spend lots of money on marketing the benefits of processor performance; sellers of commodity items (such as memory chips) don’t have nearly as much to gain from generic product marketing, because customers may choose to buy from other sellers (in such markets sellers have to concentrate on marketing themselves).

Memory capacity/speed and cpu speed are two aspects of system performance; they need to be balanced to meet customer drive application requirements. The plot below shows the SPEC cpu integer performance of 4,332 systems running at various clock rates; the colors denote the different peak memory transfer rates of the memory chips in these systems (code+data).

SPEC cpu integer performance vs. cpu clock rate

These days (and perhaps in the past, I don’t have any data), memory performance is a much better predictor of system performance, but vendors don’t have an incentive to market this fact.