COLLEGE OF COMPUTER , MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES InterConnections

Phone: 301.405.6722 ally distributed development teams to assemble highly confi gurable systems from generic services and components and then incrementally adding new features to the system over time. Porter says he “wants to create the revolutionary new tools that will help companies succeed in this new environment”. He believes that this kind of software development only works if you have rapid, highly effective and scalable software quality assurance. Otherwise, undetected problems accumulate, which eventually results in costly rework that erases the hoped-for effi ciencies. “Unfortunately,” he says, “existing quality assurance (QA) processes don’t meet these standards.” Therefore, Porter has developed a new approach to QA called Distributed, Continuous Quality Assurance (DCQA). Inspired by volunteer computing projects such as SETI@Home and Folding@Home which distribute pieces of enormous scientifi c computations to computers spread across the world he has redesigned traditional QA analyses so that they can be effi ciently run across extensive grids of computing resources, volunteered by worldwide developer and user communities, in a distributed and continuous manner. This approach greatly improves the quality and speed of QA processes, gives developers greatly expanded insight into system performance on diverse runtime environments and workloads, and allows effi cient, coordinated and transparent execution of very large scale QA processes. Take, for instance, the ACE+TAO+CIAO (ATC) project, which is a widely used suite of software that runs in thousands of commercial, academic and military systems, including DIRECTV satellite TV, the Keck observatory, and the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier. continued on page 2...