I'm doing an investigation searching for quality audit software applied to free software but haven't not much luck so far. I already found information of software that make quality audit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_audit_tools but don't know if those applies to free software too.
Any idea or information in this matter will be very useful.
Thanks in advanced.
From experience working with CAAT technology, IDEA software has been the strongest by far, but it is not free. I'm sure there is some free software, but it will be poor quality.
There's the annual Open Source Code Quality report, which seems to be the most relevant document.
References
Projects Audited by Coverity Scan
2013 Coverity Scan Report(pdf)
2012 Coverity Scan Report(pdf)
Related
I am aware that game engines like Unity, Unreal, Cry Engine provide almost all the tools necessary to build an AAA title game. Its also the best choice if the game has a tight release data or if your new to game development. But since they are generalist game engines (meaning that they are made to fit multiple genre of games. Correct me if in wrong) for some games (next-gen or games which require a lot of performance), they might leave some performance on the table, something which could be accomplished by developing a custom engine.
This brings me to my question,
Do game developers (indie game developers, large teams or even companies) still build game engines from scratch to tailor fit a game or a game franchise?
Thank You!
when we talk about big companies like Ubisoft or rockstar they built their own engines and didn't use Unity or unreal
Rockstar uses "Rockstar Advanced Game Engine"
and Ubisoft uses "AnvilNext"
but why?
there are millions of reasons they do such a thing, I'm gonna say just 2 from #scremyCat
the support
and the license
Support: Highest degree of support and understanding - as they built it all, they understand all of its internals and can offer
complete support. E.g. A game needs X feature, they'll easily know
if they can implement it or not. Another benefit of this is not
having to wait on external entities, if there's a game breaking bug
in the engine they can get right on it, while a third party engine
depending on the licensing agreement this might not be possible
(though they would typically license the source code anyway).
License: Licensing - as an indie developer accepting that you might have to pay a small percentage of your revenue for licensing
the engine might not be as much of an issue seeing as the amount you
need to breakeven is unlikely going to be very high and chances are
you're already making when your revenue is at the levels needed to
pay a %, and your total revenue from a game isn't likely going to be
huge anyway so the amount in licensing fees you need to pay may seem
very reasonable. Meanwhile a AAA game will have a much higher
break-even target and their expected revenue is most definitely in
the tens to hundreds of millions, which now means they're paying a
large amount in licensing fees. Now it should be said they usually
get much better licensing deals to begin with than the indie dev
gets, but still they're paying huge amounts.
As for timeframe, it can take years to fully develop an engine of their scale. Often why you'll see them using the same version of the engine for a good cycle of games whilst working on the next version of the engine. And as for what's involved, a LOT. They need to handle every platform they'll be targeting, the rendering, the physics, the AI, the audio, the input, the file system access, the asset management pipeline, the tools, etc.
How are they better than current popular engines? They aren't necessarily (to other developers), but to them with their own reasoning for doing it they are. The simplest answer for how can they be better is that when you're creating your own engine from scratch you can do whatever you want.
It should also be said that developing your own engine isn't just limited to large game companies, a number of smaller developers also do this. The more popular reasons for this are typically because they enjoy it, and have some functionality they want that isn't available in existing options. E.g. While you can create many games with Unity or Unreal, there's plenty of things which just aren't feasible or might take considerable work to even make possible anyway. This can be a reason for a smaller dev to make their own engine.
Yes, they absolutely do. Nintendo is a good example.
I am a very beginner in software and I am asking or a direction to proceed for research technologies to build my app. I am having just an idea for the app. I am trying to build something like zomato but different services. The idea of location based system is similar. I searched online and came to know about GIS systems. But while researching further, it seems I've to create a map all together. This feels redundant to build as we have api of google maps.
But can i use this api to build a system "ON" it????
Any tutorials or some direction in this direction would be helpful.
Also what is difference between GIS and gps based apps.
As you see, I am not very clear in the fundamentals of the GIS and GPS based apps
Thanks for the help
Regarding Android, you have almost all you need by combining the platform API and the comprehensive Google Maps Android API. Regarding the later, it's actually a matter of opting by convenience and possibly paying a licence fee to Google, versus developing your own solutions of aggregating free or cheaper services from elsewhere.
Most problems solved by apps are not the same problems solved by classical GIS software, since the former are more consumer-oriented (using public transportation, navigating a route, planning a trip, finding a nearby restaurant), and the later are more specialist-oriented, typically solving larger-scale and more technical issues (detecting regions with flood risk, monitoring deforestation, calculating volumes of terrain to be bulldozed, etc.)
You should not, IMO, be discouraged by the seemingly hard technical concepts of geography and map making. Your best bet is to have a clear vision of what actual problems you app should be solving, and study the geography topics gradually, as the need arises.
A bit of consideration on your question about GIS:
If it were created today, the GIS acronym would mean any software dealing with geographic data, be it a mobile app or a workstation software suite destined to specialized professional use.
But when it was created, the term meant almost exclusively the later sense, and so it has a lot of tradition and cultural legacy to it - which is of couse not always a good thing. Specifically (at least in my experience), it seems to me the jargon and concepts used by the classic GIS community are a bit impenetrable to the newcomer, specially if she comes from the software-development field instead of the geo-sciences field.
But geographic information availability has gone from scarcity to overwhelming abundance, and so have its enabling technologies: GPS satellites, mobile computing and mobile connectivity.
I did some Google searches but could not find any clear answer. How much does PDI/kettle costs for commercial usage? Is it potentially free? Can it be hosted in Azure?
The company I work for was recently given a quote for the Pentaho EE licence. I'm from the uk so the price is in pounds. We were offered a quote of £30,000 a year and told it is usually £50,000 a year.
Needless to say, we settled with CE.
It depends on your work amount. If you are looking for a very limited amount of usage, then Pentaho Community Edition would be better, since its free. But for Pentaho Enterprise Edition, you need to pay for the licence and stuff. Do not know much on the exact pricing and stuff.
But since you are looking only for Kettle, i would suggest to go with CE edition
. Hope it helps :)
There are two flavors of Pentaho: a limited free version (Community Edition), and a professional version (Enterprise Edition).
The Community Edition Kettle ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tool is open-source and quite powerful, but the free version of the Business Analytics tool is not as versatile. You can find both here: http://community.pentaho.com/
The Enterprise Edition's price will vary depending on your planned use, primarily the number of cores you want to run it on. I can't give exact numbers, but as of December 2014 it's the most afforable of the professional BI platforms, probably about 10% of the cost of Microstrategy. Might still be out of reach of most small to medium businesses, though.
I am working in a project which is quite complex in terms of size (it's to make a web app). The first problem is that nobody is interested in any products which could really solve the problems surrounding the project (lack of time, no adjustments in timescales in response to ever changing requirements). Bare in mind these products are not expensive ( < $500 for a company making millions) and not products which require a lot of configuration (though the project needs products like that, such as build automation tools, to free up time).
Anyway, this means that testing is all done manually as documentation is a deliverable - this means the actual technical design, implementation and testing of the site suffers (are we developers or document writers? What are we trying to do here? are questions which come to mind). The site is quite large and complex (not on the scale of Facebook or anything like that), but doing manual tests as instructed to do so (despite my warnings) tells me this is not high quality testing and therefore not a high quality product to come out of it.
What benefits can I suggest to the relevant people to encourage automated testing (which they know I can implement)? I know it is possible to change resolution via cmd with a 3rd party app for Windows, so this could all be part of an automated build. Instead, I will probably have to run through all these permutations of browsers, screen resolutions, and window sizes manually. Also, where do recorded tests fall down on? Do they break when windows are minimised? The big problem with this is that I am doing the work in monitoring the test and the PC is not doing ALL of the work, which is my job (make the pc do all the work). And given a lack of resources, this clogs up a dev box - yes, used for development and then by me for testing. Much better to automate this for a night run when the box is free.
Thanks
Talking about money is usually the best way to get management attention, so here are a few suggestions:
Estimate how long it takes you to do your current manual testing.
Get a list of critical bugs that were found by customers - ideally with an idea of the impact cost (fixing a bug after release is always much more expensive than before), but it's usually good enough just to describe one or two particularly bad bugs. Your manual testing didn't catch these customer bugs, so this is a good way to demonstrate that your manual testing is inadequate.
Come up with a pilot project where you automate testing a certain area of the product where bugs were found in production. Estimate the cost of the pilot project - doing a restricted pilot has the advantages of being easier to scope and estimate. Then compare the ongoing cost of repeatedly running the automation versus testing every release manually; after a few release you should break even on the cost of the automation tool plus the test development. Be careful picking the automation area - try to avoid areas like a complex UI that might change significantly between releases and thus require a lot of time to be spent on updating the automated tests.
Good luck to you. I screamed for all of this and I work for a billion+ company. We still perform manual testing (including regression testing). Automated tests are finally being instituted because some of the developers went out and got demos of some of the software you're describing and began configuring a framework.
Your best bet is to come up with an actual dollars and cents documented comparison between working with a product and working without a product to prove unequivocably to the management figures in charge of spending the money and designing the processes that the ROI is not only there but people who need to perform testing and/or change their existing processes will actually find their jobs a little bit easier.
Go grassroots. Talk to your team, get them on board. Talk to your business analysts, get them on board. Talk to any QA people you have and get them on board. When the villagers attack the castle with pitchforks and torches, you can bet that the wallets will open up and you'll be performing automated testing.
I would just try to automate as much as you can, whenever you can. I don't think you need to necessarily ask for permission to do things like this. Maybe your management doesn't think of these things, and often they won't see the benefit until you show them a great example.
Is it just that capital expenditures are difficult ? I've seen places where the time of existing employees is already spent, and therefore, essentially worthless in comparison to new purchases.
As for convincing managers, cost of manual regression tests versus cost to automate. If you are running lots of manual tests, this should be an easy win. If you aren't running the tests often, try for cost of a bug. However, in many companies, the cost for a bug isn't attributed to the development department, quality and the cost of bug may not be a strong motivation (in other words, quality is just about pride and ego, not actually what it costs).
Convincing developers...if they aren't already on board...electo-shock therapy ? If they aren't there, it's going to be an up hill battle.
Have been trying to similar on my current project... I can say there's another factor - time. There's a learning curve on automated tools and automated test development. The first release that is tested with automated tools will not be tested as quickly as it was manually, because the testers are learning the tools in addition to exercising tests. The second release will be much faster and every release after that will be faster still - but the first one will be a schedule hit, if not a cost hit.
The financial case is not too hard - over time, the project saves lots of money, as resources for repetitive testing are vastly reduced.
But the hard part to find a strategy that lets you get the tool into usage with a minimum of schedule drag on the first release that uses the test tool. Testing is always squashed at the end of the schedule, so it's the thing most sensitive to schedule stress. Anything you can do to show management how to reduce or remove the learning curve and automated test setup and installation time is likely to increase your chances of using the tool.
It's commonly agreed that successful software development is as much about teamwork and communication as it is about individual programming expertise. Given this, one might assume that by operating a geographically distributed team you are at an immediate disadvantage to a tight-knit team all working locally.
When my startup company was founded, we couldn't afford shared office space and I was actually located in a different city to the rest of the team, so we all had to work remotely and use tools such as Basecamp, Skype and Trac to communicate. One the whole, this was really successful - we got a huge amount of quality work done in a short space of time and launched a successful product. Working remotely gave our developers the time and space they needed to focus on the job and be productive without having interruptions or enduring office politics. To me, this is a huge advantage.
Given my experience, as well as the success of software companies with distributed teams such as 37signals and StackOverflow (and I'm sure many more), I'm increasingly of the opinion that the advantages of running a distributed team outweighs those of running a centralised team, especially for start-up companies.
Would you agree?
Given my experience, as well as the
success of software companies with
distributed teams such as 37signals
and StackOverflow (and I'm sure many
more), I'm increasingly of the opinion
that the advantages of running a
distributed team outweighs those of
running a centralised team, especially
for start-up companies.
Would you agree?
I half agree.
Running a distributed team definitely has its disadvantages. As you pointed out in your own post, communication is a big problem. There are times, as a developer, I enjoy just bouncing ideas off other developers and swapping ideas that I may not have thought up on my own. In addition, it can be tough to get feedback or to perform code reviews (practices that I have found useful in my development experience).
With that said, I also think there is an advantage to a distributed team. The biggest of these being that developers tend to do better when they can focus and just develop and not have to worry about being interrupted or having to attend frequent meetings, etc. This was a huge advantage at one job I had at a smaller company.
In your specific situation, have you considered that one reason you were so successful was not because you were geographically dispersed, but you were successful because you're a small company? Small companies have an advantage in that you have a limited number of products, there tends to be more focus, and, as a result, you can maintain a better control over your products/schedules/etc.
That's my 2 cents.
I agree that offices are quite distracting due to noise and interruptions. But the distractions that hinder you are the other side of the coin to the ability to ask people around you questions. Although I've not tried remote working for more than a few days at a time, the inability to get an answer to a quick question in 30s is the main disadvantage that I see.
Like-for-like comparisons that might give us empirical data are very hard to do, arguably practically impossible. So that gives us the licence to speculate, right?
My pet theory is that any sufficiently talented and motivated team can make most any system, method, geographical dispersion work.
I totally agree. An office environment provides mainly distractions and opportunities to waste time and look busy. A distributed team doesn't have to pay rent, they can deduct part of their own rent or mortgage from their taxes, and they can recruit talent from virtually anywhere in the world (instead of trying to find capable RoR developers in East Bumwipe, Oklahoma).
Are you a regular reader of Joel Spolsky's blog?
Joel described the centralized offices they have set up in order to increase productivity.
More than enough room for each developer, so they can walk up and down for a while whenever a bug haunts one of them. :)
Separated offices. During work hours, only the developer and the given task exist. Nothing else.
Sound-proof walls. (As far as I can remember.) Generally useful to provide full control over work space. Devs can listen to music without headphones, for example.
As you can see, FogCreek has managed to combine most advantages of remote work, while still keeping live communication as an option.
However, due to lack of teleportation, this customized and professional office is yet to solve the problem of different world-wide locations.
From personal experience I am much more productive when working remotely. I lose the sense that someone is staring over my shoulder, criticizing me for being lazy when I'm really just taking a moment to collect my thoughts.
I also appreciate not having a commute, even if I'm only saving 20 minutes each way it's a huge load off of my back, plus I don't have to dress to be in the office so I save time getting ready in the morning.
I've found that it's fairly easy to mitigate the communication issues by implementing a certain time during the day to be online, we had people on the east and west coast so we had people stay online between 1-4p EST. Also, just making sure that everyone has each other's phone numbers was a good thing, there were many problems that could be resolved with a quick phone call.
I wish that more businesses would support remote developers, I'm in an office right now and I feel that being here is so wasteful. I could get more done in less time without the distractions involved, and would have a better ability to manage my time.
Pros: You can hire the person you like instead of sticking with those available in the neighborhood.
Cons: It can be difficult to communicate if your team members live in various time zones.
I think a start up works best if the core team are physically close in space. As the team grows and the product and processes matures remote work gains traction in my experience. During that critical first year there can't be too much communication between developers and founders.
Once the startup has real direction and good processes in place remote working becomes very effective.
Certainly having some developers working remotely saves real money in overhead costs and makes everyone happy if its possible.
In my startup a lot of our work requires direct physical interaction with expensive equipment, so we can't all be virtual. Some of us can, and our remote developers are good contributors.
I've been working for US based companies from my country for about 4 years (as of Feb 2014). The experience has been very rewarding, and I feel now absolutely comfortable doing my job remotely, but there is a learning curve that needs to be endured, which cannot be overlooked. There are so many subtleties to communication that suddenly get lost when chatting over skype or sending emails. A whole level of information brought by body language and the sheer empathy that comes from knowing personally the person you're dealing with. Over time, you learn strategies around that, but there's no denial that it is a learning process.
Also, even though sometimes having the team working on the same office is perceived as distraction-prone, in my view, it also fosters a more dynamic environment, where ideas flow more freely and faster. It also encourages a "team-attitude" towards problem solving, which is great for consistency.
I think the best approach, whenever possible, is having a bit of both - work a few days from home, so people can focus and self organize their time, and then work a few days on the same office so that they are still part of a team, instead of islands in isolation.