OT Here...Here...Parasoft CEO Blames SoBig On Arrogant Software Industry Leadership
August 22, 2003 (3:29 p.m. EST)
By Keith Ferrell , TechWeb News
Sharply criticizing complacency, arrogance and immaturity in software industry leadership, and blaming those qualities for the SoBig virus's successful march through the world's computers, Parasoft CEO Adam Kolawa delivered a rant Friday that included an offer to show the industry how to cure its errors.
The head of the privately held software development solutions company said that the industry's policy of tackling program bugs at the latter stages of development cycles is self-defeating. By that point in the development process, Kolawa said, the bugs have been replicated too many times and become too widespread, making it too difficult to detect all flaws, and leading developers to ship vulnerable products.
Those vulnerabilities, in turn, attract hackers' worms and viruses, costing business and consumers tens of billions of dollars in lost production time each year.
What most needs to be fixed, he said, is the industry's approach to testing and error correction during the development cycle. Kolawa said the software sector should apply industrial and production-line methodologies to writing code.
“I have the solution -- which will even help Microsoft,” Kolawa said unabashedly.
That solution includes incorporation of Automatic Error Prevention (AEP) methodology for improving software quality and reducing time-to-market, the Monrovia, Calif.-based company said.
According to Kolawa, AEP methodology, drawn from the insights of industrial analyst W. Edwards Demming in the mid-1900s is just as applicable to software code as to any assembly line product.
“At the end of a television set production line,” he said by way of example, “the TV is tested. If there's a problem, it's the flaw in the production line that's repaired, not each individual TV set.”
From Kolawa's perspective, the software industry pursues exactly the opposite course, sending out hundreds of thousands or millions of flawed copies, then finding and fixing one bug at a time before dispatching repairs to be applied individually.
The problem as he sees it stems from the software industry's mis-perception of itself as different from traditional industries, and in some ways better -- a mistake even traditional industries have made, to their detriment.
Kolawa believes that the software industry needs to take a page -- or more -- from mature industries such as automotive and appliance manufacturing or risk losing its preeminence to offshore developers.
“The software industry suffers the same sort of arrogance at the top level that nearly killed the U.S. car industry in the Seventies,” he said. “The 'nobody can do this better than we can' mentality that led to the surge in Japanese car sales.”
The situation is not likely to change, he said, until software makers begin instituting rigorous and ongoing testing throughout the code-writing cycle, and at the same time impose stricter management controls over the developer community, forcing them to implement and adhere to constant testing procedures throughout the process.
“But the software industry's so damned arrogant, they won't do it,” he said. “But if they don't we're going to lose more and more development jobs to companies in India and China, whose developers don't have that arrogance and whose code may be of higher quality. If we're not careful, this will be worse than the rust belt.”
