No matter what type of product or application you’re working on, it’s important that the final product be high quality and free of bugs. It becomes even more important when the software you’re developing and testing is for an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet.
According to an article on Military & Aerospace, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has more than 10 million lines of code. Luckily, Lockheed Martin understands the importance of not only testing software, but incorporating QA early in the development process. From Military & Aerospace:
“Our systems provide critical support when lives are on the line,” Martina DelRocini, software subcontract management at Lockheed Martin, explains. “Quality assurance throughout our processes ensures our systems meet their demanding requirements.”
Jtest and C++test automatically verify compliance to coding rules while generating and executing unit tests to ensure quality early in the software development lifecycle. Insure++ detects memory errors, such as corruption, leaks, and allocation errors in C/C++ code.
The fighter has apparently encountered delays directly related to the amount of software that needed to be developed and thoroughly tested, but steps were taken and tools employed with a mind toward improving test quality and efficiency.
Datel staff also needed an automated, intuitive unit testing tool which would save time, free up highly qualified staff, increase test efficiency, and improve motivation to test through a repeatable, less error-prone process. They found their solution in TBrun, LDRA’s tool for the automated generation and management of unit tests. In the end, Datel reduced the time needed to confirm the verification results and increased the repeatability of its internal process.
Everyone understands that quality is important, but it’s easy to forget just how important it is sometimes. Stories like this, and the increasing number of stories about emerging technologies and the Internet of Things being hacked, remind us that testing cannot be over looked. Some situations call for in-the-wild testing to make sure the product and its applications and software can stand up to real-world conditions and the threat of creative hackers, some might need to push out deadlines to give in-house testing enough time to ensure quality on every level. Whatever approach you take to ensure quality, testing is only going to get more important as software continues to spread into every facet of life.