A software company is an organisation — owned either by the state or private — established for profit whose primary products are various forms of software , software technology, distribution, and software product development. They make up the software industry .
40-475: Aldus Corporation was an American software company best known for its pioneering desktop publishing software. PageMaker , the company's most well-known product, ushered in the modern era of desktop computers such as the Macintosh seeing widespread use in the publishing industry. Paul Brainerd , the company's co-founder, coined the term desktop publishing to describe this paradigm. The company also originated
80-424: A program specification which states the behavior of a program, can prevent bugs. Some contend that formal specifications are impractical for anything but the shortest programs, because of problems of combinatorial explosion and indeterminacy . One goal of software testing is to find bugs. Measurements during testing can provide an estimate of the number of likely bugs remaining. This becomes more reliable
120-450: A "defect" in the final stage of the cycle has been called 'mistake metamorphism'. Different stages of a mistake in the development cycle may be described as mistake, anomaly, fault, failure, error, exception, crash, glitch, bug, defect, incident, or side effect. Software bugs have been linked to disasters. Sometimes the use of bug to describe the behavior of software is contentious due to perception. Some suggest that
160-444: A bug may be caused by a relatively minor, typographical error (typo) in the code. For example, this code executes function foo only if condition is true. But this code always executes foo : A convention that tends to prevent this particular issue is to require braces for a block even if it has just one line. Enforcement of conventions may be manual (i.e. via code review ) or via automated tools. Some contend that writing
200-582: A different group plays a key role, however each type of role must be involved throughout the whole development process: Software companies possess various systems and procedures implemented and working internally across all the sub-teams. These include: There are also Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), which embed some of these functionalities in one package and are used across the groups. They are delivered from various vendors like Borland , ECM or Compuware . Well-established software companies typically have some way of measuring their own efficiency. This
240-449: A failure would not occur until later at runtime. Some languages exclude features that easily lead to bugs, at the expense of slower performance – the principle being that it is usually better to write simpler, slower correct code than complicated, buggy code. For example, the Java does not support pointer arithmetic which is generally fast, but is considered dangerous; relatively easy to cause
280-557: A major bug. Some languages include features that add runtime overhead in order to prevent some bugs. For example, many languages include runtime bounds checking and a way to handle out-of-bounds conditions instead of crashing. A compiled language allows for detecting some typos (such as a misspelled identifier) before runtime which is earlier in the software development process than for an interpreted language. Programming techniques such as programming style and defensive programming are intended to prevent typos. For example,
320-432: A measure of impact the bug has. This impact may be data loss, financial, loss of goodwill and wasted effort. Severity levels are not standardized, but differ by context such as industry and tracking tool. For example, a crash in a video game has a different impact than a crash in a bank server. Severity levels might be crash or hang , no workaround (user cannot accomplish a task), has workaround (user can still accomplish
360-400: A number of different types of software companies: Organizing a software company is a very specialized type of management skill, where experienced persons can turn the organizational problem into a unique benefit. For example, having sub-teams spread in different time zones may allow a 24-hour company working day, if the teams, systems, and procedures are well established. A good example is
400-490: A number of various methodologies to produce the code. These can include: There are also some methodologies which combine both, such as the spiral model , Rational Unified Process (RUP) or MSF . Regardless of the methodology used, the product life cycle always consists of at least three stages: Each stage ideally takes 30% of the total time, with the remaining 10% in reserve. The UML sequence diagram of interaction between these groups may look like: At each stage
440-515: A software bug range from minor (such as a misspelled word in the user interface ) to severe (such as frequent crashing ). In 2002, a study commissioned by the US Department of Commerce 's National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that "software bugs, or errors, are so prevalent and so detrimental that they cost the US economy an estimated $ 59 billion annually, or about 0.6 percent of
SECTION 10
#1732855097913480-538: A year earlier. The rivalry continued for years, even after Adobe acquired Aldus in 1994, because FreeHand was not included, but Adobe eventually acquired Freehand in 2005 with its acquisition of Macromedia . FreeHand MX was the last version offered by Adobe but is no longer sold or updated. In early 1990, Aldus bought Silicon Beach Software , acquiring many consumer titles for the Macintosh , including SuperPaint , Digital Darkroom , SuperCard , Super3D, and Personal Press (later renamed Adobe Home Publisher). Silicon Beach
520-454: Is defined by numbers) and total anarchy (where there are no numbers at all). Whichever way the organization goes, they consider the pyramid describing the cost and risk of introducing change to already-begun development processes as a true model to manage changes. Software bug A software bug is a design defect ( bug ) in computer software . A computer program with many or serious bugs may be described as buggy . The effects of
560-484: Is easy to hide vulnerabilities in complex, little understood and undocumented source code," because, "even if people are reviewing the code, that doesn't mean they're qualified to do so." An example of an open-source software bug was the 2008 OpenSSL vulnerability in Debian . Debugging can be a significant part of the software development lifecycle . Maurice Wilkes , an early computing pioneer, described his realization in
600-435: Is typically to console , window , log file or a hardware output (i.e. LED ). Some contend that locating a bug is something of an art. It is not uncommon for a bug in one section of a program to cause failures in a different section, thus making it difficult to track, in an apparently unrelated part of the system. For example, an error in a graphics rendering routine causing a file I/O routine to fail. Sometimes,
640-628: Is usually done by defining the set of key performance indicators (KPI), such as A number of organizations are focused on reaching the optimum level of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), where "optimum" does not necessarily mean the highest. There are also other systems such as Carnegie-Mellon University 's SEMA , or particular ISO standards. Small software companies will often use light-weight approaches to their process, formalized or not. Each organization works out its own style, which lies somewhere between total technocracy (where all
680-536: The Tag Image File Format (TIFF) file format, widely used in the digital graphics profession. Aldus was founded by Brainerd (who also served as chairman of the company's board), Jeremy Jaech, Mark Sundstrom, Mike Templeman, and Dave Walter. It was founded in Seattle in 1984 and was acquired by Adobe Systems a decade later. The company was named after 15th-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius . PageMaker
720-463: The Therac-25 radiation machine deaths was a bug (specifically, a race condition ) that occurred only when the machine operator very rapidly entered a treatment plan; it took days of practice to become able to do this, so the bug did not manifest in testing or when the manufacturer attempted to duplicate it. Other bugs may stop occurring whenever the setup is augmented to help find the bug, such as running
760-440: The stakeholders . He or she leads the sub-teams directly or via the managers/leaders depending on the size of the organization . Usually teams of up to 10 person are the most operational. In bigger organizations, there are in general two models of the hierarchy: All the teams are fully independent and they work separately on the different projects. The structure is quite simple and all the employees reports to one person, what make
800-679: The behavior a bug. However, Justin Brookman of the Center for Democracy and Technology directly challenged that portrayal, stating "I'm glad that they are fixing what they call bugs, but I take exception with their strong denial that they track users." Preventing bugs as early as possible in the software development process is a target of investment and innovation. Newer programming languages tend to be designed to prevent common bugs based on vulnerabilities of existing languages. Lessons learned from older languages such as BASIC and C are used to inform
840-400: The bug's severity and priority and external factors such as development schedules. Triage generally does not include investigation into cause. Triage may occur regularly. Triage generally consists of reviewing new bugs since the previous triage and maybe all open bugs. Attendees may include project manager, development manager, test manager, build manager, and technical experts. Severity is
SECTION 20
#1732855097913880-411: The code and imagining or transcribing the execution process may often find errors without ever reproducing the bug as such. Typically, the first step in locating a bug is to reproduce it reliably. If unable to reproduce the issue, a programmer cannot find the cause of the bug and therefore cannot fix it. Some bugs are revealed by inputs that may be difficult for the programmer to re-create. One cause of
920-654: The code explicitly (perhaps as simple as a statement saying PRINT "I AM HERE" ), or provided as tools. It is often a surprise to find where most of the time is taken by a piece of code, and this removal of assumptions might cause the code to be rewritten. Open source development allows anyone to examine source code. A school of thought popularized by Eric S. Raymond as Linus's law says that popular open-source software has more chance of having few or no bugs than other software, because "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". This assertion has been disputed, however: computer security specialist Elias Levy wrote that "it
960-482: The code may eliminate the problem even though the code then no longer matches the documentation. In an embedded system , the software is often modified to work around a hardware bug since it's cheaper than modifying the hardware. Bugs are managed via activities like documenting, categorizing, assigning, reproducing, correcting and releasing the corrected code. Tools are often used to track bugs and other issues with software. Typically, different tools are used by
1000-472: The design of later languages such as C# and Rust . Languages may include features such as a static type system , restricted namespaces and modular programming . For example, for a typed, compiled language (like C ): is syntactically correct, but fails type checking since the right side, a string, cannot be assigned to a float variable. Compilation fails – forcing this defect to be fixed before development progress can resume. With an interpreted language,
1040-439: The gross domestic product". Since the 1950s, some computer systems have been designed to detect or auto-correct various software errors during operations. Mistake metamorphism (from Greek meta = "change", morph = "form") refers to the evolution of a defect in the final stage of software deployment. Transformation of a "mistake" committed by an analyst in the early stages of the software development lifecycle, which leads to
1080-462: The late 1940s that “a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs”. A program known as a debugger can help a programmer find faulty code by examining the inner workings of a program such as executing code line-by-line and viewing variable values. As an alternative to using a debugger, code may be instrumented with logic to output debug information to trace program execution and view values. Output
1120-441: The longer a product is tested and developed. Agile software development may involve frequent software releases with relatively small changes. Defects are revealed by user feedback. With test-driven development (TDD), unit tests are written while writing the production code, and the production code is not considered complete until all tests complete successfully. Tools for static code analysis help developers by inspecting
1160-424: The most difficult part of debugging is finding the cause of the bug. Once found, correcting the problem is sometimes easy if not trivial. Sometimes, a bug is not an isolated flaw, but represents an error of thinking or planning on the part of the programmers. Often, such a logic error requires a section of the program to be overhauled or rewritten. Some contend that as a part of code review , stepping through
1200-482: The other Aldus partners named the company after Aldus Pius Manutius , a renowned fifteenth-century Venetian pioneer in publishing known for standardizing the rules of punctuation and also presenting several typefaces, including the first italic. Manutius later founded the first modern publishing house, the Aldine Press. (formerly Silicon Beach Software and After Hours Software) Software company There are
1240-420: The product/project manager and the specialized "resource" manager. On one hand it optimizes the usage of human resources, on the other hand it may give rise to conflicts about which one manager has priority in the structure. There are also a number of variants of these structures, and a number of organizations have this structure spread and split within various departments and units. Software companies may use
Aldus Corporation - Misplaced Pages Continue
1280-526: The program text beyond the compiler's capabilities to spot potential problems. Although in general the problem of finding all programming errors given a specification is not solvable (see halting problem ), these tools exploit the fact that human programmers tend to make certain kinds of simple mistakes often when writing software. Tools to monitor the performance of the software as it is running, either specifically to find problems such as bottlenecks or to give assurance as to correct working, may be embedded in
1320-527: The program with a debugger; these are called heisenbugs (humorously named after the Heisenberg uncertainty principle ). Since the 1990s, particularly following the Ariane 5 Flight 501 disaster, interest in automated aids to debugging rose, such as static code analysis by abstract interpretation . Often, bugs come about during coding, but faulty design documentation may cause a bug. In some cases, changes to
1360-413: The situation quite clear however it is not a good solution in terms of knowledge exchange and optimal usage of human resources. In this model there are dedicated managers/leaders for each main specialization, "renting" their people for particular projects led by product/project managers, who formally or informally buy the people and pay for their time. This leads to each private employee having two bosses –
1400-468: The software development team to track their workload than by customer service to track user feedback . A tracked item is often called bug , defect , ticket , issue , feature , or for agile software development , story or epic . Items are often categorized by aspects such as severity, priority and version number . In a process sometimes called triage , choices are made for each bug about whether and when to fix it based on information such as
1440-442: The term should be abandoned; replaced with defect or error . Some contend that bug implies that the defect arose on its own and push to use defect instead since it more clearly connotates caused by a human. Some contend that bug may be used to coverup an intentional design decision. In 2011, after receiving scrutiny from US Senator Al Franken for recording and storing users' locations in unencrypted files, Apple called
1480-480: The test team in a time zone 8 hours ahead or behind the development team, who fix software bugs found by the testers. A professional software company normally consists of at least three dedicated sub-teams : In bigger software companies, greater specialization is employed, and quite often there are also: The manager of a software company is usually called the Head Of Development (HOD), and reports to
1520-551: Was located in San Diego , California, and became the Aldus Consumer Division. In 1993, Aldus bought After Hours Software and incorporated its products, TouchBase Pro and DateBook Pro, into the Aldus Consumer Division. In the same year, it acquired Company of Science and Art (CoSA) . In September 1994, Adobe purchased Aldus for $ 446 million. At that time, PageMaker was steadily losing market share to QuarkXPress , but Adobe
1560-558: Was released in July 1985 and relied on Adobe 's PostScript page description language. For output, it used the Apple LaserWriter , a PostScript laser printer . PageMaker for the PC was released in 1986. In 1988, Aldus released an illustration program, FreeHand , which was licensed from Fontographer developer Altsys . FreeHand competed directly with Adobe Illustrator , which had been released
1600-471: Was still five years from launching their own desktop publisher, InDesign . In 2001, after two major releases under Adobe, PageMaker was discontinued and users were urged to switch to the two-year-old InDesign. Aldus developed the TIFF and OPI industry standards. The three founders of Visio Corporation left Aldus in 1990 to create the product which later became known as Microsoft Office Visio . Paul Brainerd and
#912087