Progress announced the latest release of Progress® Semaphore™, its metadata management and semantic AI platform.
As the debate rages on within companies of all sizes on who should "own" software quality, and at what stage(s) of the SDLC should testing be performed, an interesting finding popped up in the most recent SmartBear State of Software Quality | Code Review report. Close to 800 participants in the survey — nearly 80% of which define their roles as either developers, architects, or systems engineers — stated that code review is the number one thing a company can do to improve code quality.
In looking at a previous years' findings, code review also took the top spot in 2020, but it was in a sharp decline from its highest-ever spot in 2019. At the same time, unit testing, which has come in second place each year, was on a sharp upswing in 2020's report, nearly tying code review for the top ranking. However, in 2021, code review is trending upward again, while unit testing is headed in the opposite direction.
No matter which of the two that respondents believe is the best contributor to overall code quality, code review and unit testing enable issues to be spotted and remediated early in the development lifecycle. When performed together — it should never be an "either/or" decision—these two can prevent higher costs to repair, greater threats to scheduled release dates, or bugs slipping through to production and being found by your customers.
As to how often code review sessions are being performed, and how often they perhaps should be performed (though, there is no "one size fits all" for anything in software development), more than 70% of respondents reported that they participate in code review on a weekly basis. At the same time, respondents were asked if they're satisfied with their team's current code review processes. Forty-three percent reported being satisfied, and 11% were very satisfied.
Personally, I'd love to speak with some of the 28%, a pretty large percentage, who reported being simply "neutral" about the code review processes currently being conducted by their teams. Questions like:
Does your whole team share this feeling?
What would make your team more satisfied with more code review frequency?
Moving from ad-hoc to tool-based?
What benefits, not just to your code, but what benefits are you receiving from your code review sessions?
What are you learning?"
Speaking of the learning opportunities available within code review sessions, I was thrilled to see that 82% of respondents (54% agree/28% strongly agree) don't just learn, but learn often, and learn from the other people, not just from the evolutions of their code. Improvements to software quality will likely always be the most important benefit of code review to most developers (90% said so), but 75% rated knowledge sharing highly, 61% said it helps with mentoring new developers, and 52% recognized code review's contribution toward increased collaboration. I love all of these responses.
The invaluable learning that can take place during code review sessions is immensely important to never lose sight of. As teams make knowledge sharing an even greater priority, I think, and hope, we'll see those who "strongly agree" with being satisfied with their current code review processes take up a lot more of the pie than it does today. And to the 11% who are highly satisfied today, congratulations! Now it's time to help others feel the same way.
Industry News
Elastic, the Search AI Company, announced the Elasticsearch Open Inference API now integrates with Anthropic, providing developers with seamless access to Anthropic’s Claude, including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Haiku and Claude 3 Opus, directly from their Anthropic account.
Broadcom unveiled VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9, the future of VCF that will accelerate customers’ transition from siloed IT architectures to a unified and integrated private cloud platform that lowers cost and risk.
Broadcom announced VMware Tanzu Platform 10, a cloud native application platform that accelerates software delivery, providing platform engineering teams enhanced governance and operational efficiency while reducing toil and complexity for development teams.
Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift, the next major release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
Salesforce announced new innovations in Slack that make it easier for users to build automations, no matter their technical expertise.
GitLab announced the general availability of the GitLab Duo Enterprise add-on.
Tigera now delivers universal microsegmentation capabilities with Calico.
Tabnine announced a new platform partnership with Broadcom Inc., an integration with IBM, as well as continuing extensions of existing partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Wallarm released API Attack Surface Management (AASM), an agentless technology to help organizations identify, analyze, and secure their entire API attack surface.
LambdaTest launched KaneAI, an end-to-end software AI Test Agent.
Kubiya has closed its $12 million seed round with a $6 million extension of equity and debt financing and launched a paradigm-breaking new platform, AI Teammates, that enables true delegation of complex tasks to digital colleagues through organic, human-like conversations.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the schedule for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024, happening in Salt Lake City, Utah from November 12 – 15.
Diagrid announced the latest version of Dapr, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubating project maintained by Diagrid, Microsoft, Intel, Alibaba, and others, as well as an update to Conductor, a Software as a Service (SaaS) that helps manage, upgrade, and monitor Dapr on Kubernetes clusters.
Spectro Cloud announced two new formal recognitions of its strengthening position in the government technology space: the Government Software competency from AWS, and ‘Awardable’ status on the CDAO Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace for AI/ML solutions at the tactical edge.