Product Description
by Ambrose O. Akpotaire (Author)
Poor quality software is so prevalent today that it is accepted as the norm. Unfortunately, this condition comes at a very high cost by way of business disruption and high levels of technical support. The cause of poor quality is partially due to developers but more management and total organizational culture. Therefore, the solution to eliminating poor quality involves new thinking on the part of users, quality assurance testers, all levels of management, the organizational culture and software engineers. This book highlights each player's current contributions to low quality and how to remedy them.
Author Biography
Ambrose Akpotaire (pronounced Ak po tai re) has been in Information Technology for 23 years at the time of writing. He has had the role of developer, architect, designer, tester, supervisor, manager and many others. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in natural gas engineering and prior to being a software engineer, was a petroleum engineer. Ambrose taught himself software development in order to automate a delivery service company, Dial N Dine, which he started with a partner. The company delivered prepared food from neighborhood restaurants to nearby homes and businesses. Software was needed to automate the delivery operation. He completed the software which allowed Dial N Dine to take food orders on the computer, send the ticket to the appropriate restaurant's printer and automatically send a message to a selected driver's alpha numeric pager. This was incredible because the internet had not been invented. This in house developed software included accounting and other modules. Ambrose learned quality software development the hard way. While working for a petrochemical company early in his career, he received what the company called "Epic Award" for quality from the president himself because users raved about its user friendliness and beautiful screens. Unfortunately, he was reprimanded two weeks later because his supervisor did not like the flow of his code. She complained it did not have indentations between "IFs" and "END IFs" properly lined up. While the code was correct in every other way, it was difficult to read. Another consultant was hired and Ambrose was amazed, watching him make the code look pretty (pleasing to look at) without changing any logic. He learned a lot from this tragedy, which has shaped his views of software quality. Very few developers have had the fortunate-misfortune, as they deserve, of being reprimanded for very poor quality coding. Ambrose moved on to become a high quality conscientious developer in all respects and has created many applications that ran non-stop for years without a single support call. The wealth of experiences gained from working with other developers (good and bad ) lead him to write this book.
