28.

We discuss the context in which modern software is developed, and identify some of the shortcomings of the old approaches to development and debugging.

Examining Trends in Software Design, Implementation, and Maintenance

Over the past few years, new trends have emerged that are drastically affecting the way software is designed, implemented, and maintained:

• Increase in demand for safe, secure systems.

• Recognition of the limitations of traditional software engineering.

• Availability of open-source software projects.

• Demand for languages with platform-independent semantics.

Let's look at each of these issues in detail.

Increase in demand for safe, secure systems

The demand for safe, secure systems has grown tremendously. The terms "safe" and "secure" mean different things depending on who you ask, By "safe," I mean systems that don't break even when a user makes a mistake. By "secure" I mean systems that don't break even when they are deliberately attacked. For example, consider a web service for airline reservations. Suppose a user accidentally tries to get reservations for an impossible date (say, February 30). If the system is safe, it won't crash; instead, it will display an error message and allow the user to try again (or, better yet, the UI itself will prevent the user from ever entering this erroneous date). Now suppose that an attacker tries to snoop and play back someone else's credit card information when booking his ticket. If the system is secure, it will have measures in place to prevent him from doing so. To be sure, these two notions aren't completely distinct. A sufficiently inept attacker will be thwarted simply by a safe system. A sufficiently dopey user might trip over a sequence of actions that are prevented only by security measures. Once, in my early days on Unix, I accidentally put into my startup script for shell windows a command that started up yet another shell window. As soon as I opened one shell window, more and more windows were created, sucking more and more resources from the network, and bringing down several servers. This continued until a sys admin, who believed his network was under attack, shut down the account responsible (i.e., mine). It took awhile before he let me log in again.

With the growth in Internet commerce, the increasingly ubiquitous use of networked computing services, and the progress in embedded systems (many of which are intended for users with little or no computer experience), it is easy to see why demand for safety and security is on the rise.

Recognition of the limitations of traditional software engineering

There is growing recognition that the traditional methods of software engineering-focused on heavy up-front design and a strict separation of programmer roles into separate individuals (such as architect, coder, tester, etc.)-are often of limited use. Inevitably, designs change as a development team learns more about the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches. Such knowledge can be gained only through the process of actually building a system; a priori modeling is no substitute. The result is that many aspects of up-front designs are thrown away, and the effort spent in constructing them is wasted.

Additionally, the separation of programmers into various roles tends to impede knowledge transfer. Even if the coders discover that a design is flawed, it may still be quite difficult to convince the architects, and the testers may not be familiar enough with the code to test it thoroughly. The result of this division is poorly designed, poorly tested software that nobody's happy with. And, by the way, it doesn't work.

Even under ideal conditions in which deadlines are both reasonable and flexible, ample programmers of great proficiency are available, and software requirements are perfectly specified (and never change), traditional software engineering doesn't work very well. But real-world software is never developed under ideal conditions. It's developed in the presence of all sorts of complications, such as:

• Business realities. Business realities often result in systems that are rushed to market and are neither well documented nor well tested. When a product is already two weeks late and everything has been done except test it, you can bet that testing will be given short shrift.

• Lack of design experience. The developers of many new systems often have no experience in designing similar systems. This may not be a result of poor management, but an inevitable consequence of the massive shortage in experienced software developers.

• Difficult communication with users. The customers of software typically are not able to define their requirements well, often because they're not yet sure what their requirements are. In most cases, this isn't because they are "bad" customers; usually, it is because many software projects are the first systems of their kind to be put in place, and the customers have no real-world experience to help them determine which features would be of most use.

The real world of software development is one of chaos. As a result, the traditional rigid processes of software engineering are beginning to give way to more agile, adaptive methods such as extreme programming (XP). Agile methods hold promise in helping to meet the demand for increased reliability. In particular, an increased emphasis on unit testing can dramatically improve the reliability of a software system.

Availability of open-source software projects

Another trend that is affecting reliability is the growing body of freely available open-source software projects. The open-source concept and the code produced by the open-source community is challenging the business models of traditional software companies, providing competing products at no cost and (due to the openness of the source code) of often superior quality. The most striking example is the Linux operating system, which provides an alternative to existing commercial operating systems that is more stable and robust than many of its competitors.

Demand for languages with platform-independent semantics

There has been a surge in demand for languages with platform-independent semantics, along with virtual machines to execute them. The most famous language in this category is Java. Java programmers' compiled binaries enjoy an unprecedented level of portability; this portability can drastically decrease the cost of software development, since developers don't need to maintain separate source code or compile separate binaries for each target platform.