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Enough to make your pulse soar

Editorial Type: Opinion     Date: 11-2014    Views: 2011   









Imagine this scenario: Monitoring programmers' pulses, their eye movements and even anxiety levels to detect when they could be in trouble. Even ‘Big Brother’ might have baulked at that! But it may soon be a reality.

Following on from the news emanating out of Microsoft that it is trialling a new way of preventing code bugs by monitoring programmers' pulse, eye movements and anxiety levels to detect when they could be in trouble - 'Stopping Bugs Before They Sneak into Software' (http://bit.ly/WhHF3T) - Amichai Shulman, CTO Imperva, believes this method is 'tremendously intrusive'. "I do think that current methods for improving coding practices and reducing the number of bugs in the original code have reached the point of diminishing returns. Additionally, it seems that current QA practices seem to have reached a plateau as well. Therefore it is understandable that the software companies are looking for new methods to improve their software quality."

He singles out one specific quote from the MS blog: 'Those mistakes - known in tech circles as 'bugs' - can cause serious consequences for customers. Eliminating coding bugs is well-nigh impossible, but for software companies, reducing their numbers by any reasonable means is a high priority.'

To this, Shulman responds: "The question is, of course, what constitutes 'reasonable means' and whether indeed 'the cause justifies the means'. In particular, I think constantly monitoring the psychological status and the physical conditions of programmers seems tremendously intrusive, and probably strays way off from what I consider to be reasonable means. However, I think that, even if we review this through the cold eyes of a software professional, there are some doubts about the usefulness of this method in general and its application to security vulnerabilities in particular.

"One of the main reasons for software flaws today is that programmers are constantly under pressure of delivering more functionality in less time. On their way to achieving higher rates of LOC/sec, programmers, as well as their employers, are willing to sacrifice other attributes of the code, such as efficiency, readability and also correctness - assuming that some of these will be corrected later during testing cycles and some will not be critical enough to be ever fixed.

"If we introduce a system that constantly holds back on programmers, because they are stressed for some reason, we will effectively introduce unbearable delays into the project, which will, of course, put more pressure on those who perform the job when schedules become tight.

"This is, of course, ignoring the fact that, to some extent, we want our programmers to be 'over-challenged' by the problems they have to solve in code, in order to keep them 'sharp' and happy with their jobs. Additionally, there's a big question of whether a system like that can make a distinction between making a critical mistake or a minor one, which again impacts its ability to have a positive effect on the software development process in general."

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