An excellent tool in your arsenal for ensuring software quality is to establish software design patterns. Software design patterns can help reduce the insertion of software defects and also facilitates finding software defects during development. One to consider is GRASP software design guidelines that help to create consistency with software class responsibility. GRASP is acronym...Read More

Why Software Keeps Failing is the title of the editor’s page for IEEE’s Spectrum December 2025 issue. The answer to “why software keeps failing”? Lessons are learned but not applied. From the editor: In 2005’s “Why Software Fails,” in IEEE Spectrum, a seminal article documenting the causes behind large-scale software failures, Charette noted, “The biggest...Read More

Shepherdly: A bug prediction & code resilience coverage tool In the context of software development, Resilience Coverage measures the overall protection a pull request has against bugs that can impact large portions of your user base and/or expose observability gaps. When coupled with a Software Quality Risk Score driven by a predictive model, engineers can...Read More

Interesting list from the Central Digital and Data Office of the U.K. Government on using open source development. They provide a handy checklist of things to consider when deciding on open source or proprietary software. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/be-open-and-use-open-sourceRead More

FDA released a draft guidance document for patient matched guides for orthopedic implants.  The guidance provides recommendations to manufacturers regarding the design-and-production process for these types of devices.  Patient matched guides, as the name implies, are unique to the patient and are created to assist pre-surgical planning.  The clinician is better able to visualize proper...Read More

Just a few thoughts on metrics … specifically software metric.  A software metric defines a standard way of measuring some attribute of the software development process or an attribute of a software component. A software metric allows us to compare and evaluate one process or component with another, and plan to improve quality of a...Read More

This post discusses some code review basics – concepts and inspection ideas that one might use when performing a code review.  A code review is a technical verification activity.  The purpose is most often to identify coding errors against the design intent – one is verifying that the code actually accomplishes what that author intended....Read More

Probabilistic Genotyping Used for Criminal Prosecution In a recent article published on The Markup, software that is used to match DNA in criminal prosecution has come under scrutiny.  The software implements what is known as probabilistic genotyping, a method used when analyzing data that contains a mixture of DNA from multiple people.  The software uses complex...Read More