googletesting: The Plague of Entropy

The Plague of Entropy

Monday, September 14, 2009

Mathematically entropy is a measure of uncertainty. If there are, say, five events then maximum entropy occurs when those five events are equally likely and minimum entropy when one of those events is certain and the other four impossible.
The more uncertain events you have to consider, the higher measured entropy climbs. People often think of entropy as a measure of randomness: the more (uncertain) events one must consider, the more random the outcome becomes.
Testers introduce entropy into development by adding to the number of things a developer has to do. When developers are writing code, entropy is low. When we submit bugs, we increase entropy. Bugs divert their attention from coding. They must now progress in parallel on creating and fixing features. More bugs means more parallel tasks and raises entropy. This entropy is one reason that bugs foster more bugs ... the entropic principle ensures it. Entropy creates more entropy! Finally there is math to show what is intuitively appealing: that prevention beats a cure.
However, there is nothing we can do to completely prevent the plague of entropy other than create developers who never err. Since this is unlikely any time soon we must recognize how and when we are introducing entropy and do what we can to manage it. The more we can do during development the better. Helping out in code reviews, educating our developers about test plans, user scenarios and execution environments so they can code against them will reduce the number of bugs we have to report. Smoking out bugs early, submitting them in batches and making sure we submit only high quality bugs by triaging them ourselves will keep their mind on development. Writing good bug reports and quickly regressing fixes will keep their attention where it needs to be. In effect, it maximizes the certainty of the 'development event' and minimizes the number and impact of bugs. Entropy thus tends toward it's minimum.
We can't banish this plague but if we can recognize the introduction of entropy into development and understand its inevitable effect on code quality, we can keep it at bay.

Testing Blog

The Plague of Entropy

No comments :

Post a Comment

Labels

Archive

Feed

Company-wide

Products

Developers