No Silver Bullet? A Silver Buckshot May Work

Summary:

It seems that someone is always promising a cure all—the proverbial "silver bullet"—for software woes. Greg's goals for this presentation are for us to understand what "better" really means, to discuss common problems and potential solutions, and to become empowered to make our personal and our group's practices better.

It seems that someone is always promising a cure all—the proverbial "silver bullet"—for software woes. Still, the most common request Gregory Pope gets from software developers and managers is to "look at our development process and tell us how to make it better." Greg's goals for this presentation are for us to understand what "better" really means, to discuss common problems and potential solutions, and to become empowered to make our personal and our group's practices better. Although there may not be a silver bullet for your software woes, perhaps there is "silver buckshot"—a collection of techniques and tools to solve common problems.

About the author

Gregory M. Pope

Gregory M. Pope is a Software Quality Engineer at the University of California Lawrence Livermore Laboratory supporting Advanced Simulation using Large Scale Parallel Computing. Mr. Pope has worked in a variety of capacities at virtually all levels of software development and testing. He began his career developing software used to test jet engines and helicopters. He later worked in the defense industry, testing mission-critical software for military and space applications. Working in the private sector, he has developed and patented techniques for computer-aided testing. Among his inventions is the Ferret, a highly regarded software-testing tool manufactured and marketed by his former company.