Quality Assurance

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Quality Assurance

• Bug Tracking System
• Memory Debuggers
• Unit Testing Framework

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Motivation

• Automates the software maintenance process
• Keeps track of when bugs where found and fixed
• More tools to find difficult bugs
• Automated testing framework

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Bugzilla

• Open source bug tracking system from the Mozilla
  project
• Product-based granular security schema
• Advanced reporting capabilities
• Browser user interface

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Using Bugzilla

• Create an Account
• Get Permissions from the Administrator
• Running Queries
• Filing a Bug Report

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Running Queries

• Query before you file a bug report
• Get Summary Reports to see which bugs are still
  outstanding
• Filling in fields limits the search
• Use the Long Listing for all of the bugs info

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Filing a Bug Report

• Descriptive Summary
• Specifically explain how to reproduce the bug
• One bug per report
• If the bug crashes the program a stack trace
• on the core is proper etiquette

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Configuring your project

• Products- your project
• Components aspects of your project
• Versions releases of your project
• Milestones releases by when certain bugs will
  be fixed
• Voting Allows users to pick which bug they want
  fixed

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Integration with 3rd Party Tools

• Bonsai Web based CVS
• CVS
• Perforce
• Tinderbox

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Purify

• http//ww-itg.lbl.gov/purify
• Memory debugger for C/ C programs
• Memory Debugger for the solaris platform
• Has a GUI interface

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How to use Purify

• Setup your environment
• Link in the purify libraries when you compile
  your program
• Run your program

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Problems with Purify

• Licensing
• Only 3 accounts can use it
• Portnoy is becoming BSD machine

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Valgrind

• http//developer.kde.org/sewardj/
• Memory Debugger for x86/Linux only
• Easy to use valgrind executable ltargsgt
• Runs the program in a simulated x86 CPU
• Environment
• Cannot use this on statically linked binaries

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What valgrind detects

• Use of uninitialised memory
• Reading/writing memory after it has been free'd
• Reading/writing off the end of malloc'd blocks
• Reading/writing inappropriate areas on the stack
• Memory leaks -- where pointers to malloc'd blocks
  are lost forever
• Passing of uninitialised and/or unaddressible
  memory to system calls
• Mismatched use of malloc/new/new vs
  free/delete/delete
• Some misuses of the POSIX pthreads API

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How to use Valgrind

• Its best to compile executables with g
• and no optimization options
• Use v for a summary of errors

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Useful flags

• --help
• --attach-gdbyes
• --leak-checkyes
• --show-reachableyes
• --logfileltfilegt
• --num-callers4

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Unit Testing

• MOTIVATION
• Do you test your software?
• Provides an extensible framework to
• aggregate code that tests your project

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The Goal

• Automatically test your software by periodically
  running the unittests
• One solution
• Create a cron job that checks out, builds , runs
  the unittests nightly and mails the results to
  you.