Evolution of debugging techniques in software quality assurance

¶ … Debugging

Software quality assurance requires a continual stream of performance data including insights into which actions or tasks led to software code becoming more scalable, reliable and usable. At the center of software quality assurance is reliance on techniques for measuring variation in the quality of each individual code component, and the overall code base of an application (Kosar, 622). The concept of debugging has arisen out of the need for discovering logic errors or what is sometimes called "bugs" in the software code which cause specific features or the entire application to not work correctly (Kosar, et.al.). The origins of debugging and best practices in using them are defined in this paper.

Analysis of Debugging Techniques

Contrary to the many descriptions of debugging as being a somewhat random technique used for finding erroneous sections of code in a complex software program, the most effective approaches rely on a very methodical, organized approach to finding inconsistent coding logic (Kosar, 622). Six Sigma-based approaches that rely on the DMAIC methodology (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control) are often used in advanced programming and development projects where the critical path for the overall project is reliant on core software components achieving exceptional levels of compliance to internal standards (Bates, Wileden, 255). Debugging techniques in the past were most often manually-based and therefore were more recursive and focused on selectively checking which key integration points throughout an entire software system were operating reliably or not. Since those initial efforts at debugging where manually-based approaches were relied on for decades, software quality assurance engineers became more focused on how to automate them first with UNIX-based shell scripts that could be scheduled to run when the system resources were available (Bates, Wileden, et.al.). UNIX-based shell scripts are in predominant use today in many enterprise software companies today as their quality management departments have standardized on them.