Decoding Computer Software

Computer Program ... Computer programs may be categorized along functional lines: system software and application software... A person who practices this skill is referred to as a computer programmer, software developer or coder... The term software engineering is becoming popular as the process is seen as an engineering discipline...

Destructive Testing ... Version 2 of the GNU General Public License does not allow software to be distributed if that software requires a patent licence that does not "permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you"... For this study, Ravicher performed patent searches to estimate the patent-risk of the Linux kernel: In conclusion, he found that no court-validated software patent is infringed by the Linux kernel... However, Ravicher also found 283 issued but not yet court-validated software patents that, if upheld as valid by the courts, could potentially be used to support patent claims against Linux...

Computer Standard ... Developers prefer using standards for software development because of the efficiencies it provides for code development and wider user acceptance and use of the resulting application... For example, the protocols HTML, TCP/IP, SMTP, POP and FTP are software standards that an application designer must understand and follow if their software expects to interface with these standards...

Software Engineer ... The term programmer has often been used as a pejorative term to refer to those without the tools, skills, education, or ethics to write good quality software... In response, many practitioners called themselves software engineers to escape the stigma attached to the word programmer... In many companies, the titles programmer and software developer were changed to software engineer, for many categories of programmers...

Software Documentation ... Without proper requirements documentation, software changes become more difficult—and therefore more error prone (decreased software quality) and time-consuming (expensive)...

Software Patent ... Important issues concerning software patents include: Where the boundary between patentable and non-patentable software should lie; Whether the inventive step and non-obviousness requirement is applied too loosely to software; and Whether patents covering software discourage, rather than encourage, innovation...

White-box Testing ... Specific knowledge of the application's code/internal structure and programming knowledge in general is not required. The tester is only aware of what the software is supposed to do, but not how i.e...

Programmer ... British countess and mathematician Ada Lovelace is popularly credited as history's first programmer, as she was the first to express an algorithm intended for implementation on a computer, Charles Babbage's analytical engine, in October 1842, intended for the calculation of Bernoulli numbers. Her work never ran because Babbage's machine was never completed to a functioning standard in her time; the first programmer to successfully run a program on a functioning modern electronically based computer was pioneer computer scientist Konrad Zuse, who achieved this feat in 1941...

Software Patents And Free Software ... As a rule, system testing takes, as its input, all of the "integrated" software components that have successfully passed integration testing and also the software system itself integrated with any applicable hardware system (s)... The purpose of integration testing is to detect any inconsistencies between the software units that are integrated together (called assemblages) or between any of the assemblages and the hardware... Software Testing portal Testing the whole system System testing is performed on the entire system in the context of a Functional Requirement Specification (s) (FRS) and/or a System Requirement Specification (SRS)...

Social Network Analysis Software ... Network analysis software generally consists of either packages based on graphical user interfaces (GUIs), or packages built for scripting/programming languages...

3D Computer Graphics ... 3D computer graphics rely on many of the same algorithms as 2D computer vector graphics in the wire-frame model and 2D computer raster graphics in the final rendered display. In computer graphics software, the distinction between 2D and 3D is occasionally blurred; 2D applications may use 3D techniques to achieve effects such as lighting, and 3D may use 2D rendering techniques...

Black-box Testing ... One of the main reasons for regression testing is to determine whether a change in one part of the software affects other parts of the software... Background Experience has shown that as software is fixed, emergence of new and/or reemergence of old faults is quite common... Often, a fix for a problem will be "fragile" in that it fixes the problem in the narrow case where it was first observed but not in more general cases which may arise over the lifetime of the software...

Test Automation ... These applications are either pre-installed on phones during manufacture, downloaded by customers from various mobile software distribution platforms, or web applications delivered over HTTP which use server-side or client-side processing (e.g...

Montage Image Mosaic Software ... The Supreme Court of the United States issued an opinion on appeal (as Bilski v. Kappos) that affirmed the judgment of the CAFC, but revised many aspects of the CAFC's decision...

Software Development ... Software can be developed for a variety of purposes, the three most common being to meet specific needs of a specific client/business (the case with custom software), to meet a perceived need of some set of potential users (the case with commercial and open source software), or for personal use (e.g... Embedded software development, that is, the development of embedded software such as used for controlling consumer products, requires the development process to be integrated with the development of the controlled physical product... The need for better quality control of the software development process has given rise to the discipline of software engineering, which aims to apply the systematic approach exemplified in the engineering paradigm to the process of software development...

Software Quality ... Historically, the structure, classification and terminology of attributes and metrics applicable to software quality management have been derived or extracted from the ISO 9126-3 and the subsequent ISO 25000:2005 quality model, also known as SQuaRE... Based on these models, the software structural quality characteristics have been clearly defined by the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ), an independent organization founded by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Object Management Group (OMG)... CISQ has defined 5 major desirable characteristics needed for a piece of software to provide business value: Reliability, Efficiency, Security, Maintainability and (adequate) Size...

Copyright Infringement Of Software ... Motivation Some of the motives for engaging in the illegal activity of copyright infringement are the following: Pricing – unwillingness or inability to pay the price requested by the legitimate sellers Unavailability – no legitimate sellers providing the product in the country of the end-user: not yet launched there, already withdrawn from sales, never to be sold there, geographical restrictions on online distribution and international shipping Usefulness – the legitimate product comes with various means (DRM, region lock, DVD region code, Blu-ray region code) of restricting legitimate use (backups, usage on devices of different vendors, offline usage) or comes with annoying non-skipable advertisements and anti-piracy disclaimers, which are removed in the pirated product making it more desirable for the end-user Shopping experience – no legitimate sellers providing the product with the required quality through online distribution and through a shopping system with...

History Of Software Engineering ... There are two general approaches to test automation: Code-driven testing. The public (usually) interfaces to classes, modules or libraries are tested with a variety of input arguments to validate that the results that are returned are correct...

Software Testing ... Software testing can be stated as the process of validating and verifying that a software program/application/product: meets the requirements that guided its design and development; works as expected; and can be implemented with the same characteristics... Software testing, depending on the testing method employed, can be implemented at any time in the development process... Different software development models will focus the test effort at different points in the development process...

Software License ... Some software comes with the license when purchased off the shelf or an OEM license when bundled with hardware... Software licenses can generally be fit into the following categories: proprietary licenses and free and open source licenses, which include free software licenses and other open source licenses... A free open source license makes software free for inspection of its code, modification, and distribution...

Software Bug ... This was initially dismissed as pilot error, but an investigation by Computer Weekly uncovered sufficient evidence to convince a House of Lords inquiry that it may have been caused by a software bug in the aircraft's engine control computer...

Stop Online Piracy Act ... While white-box testing can be applied at the unit, integration and system levels of the software testing process, it is usually done at the unit level...