Blog entries for "software engineering"

Changes to BIND 9 development helped catch bugs

01 Dec 2010
Michael Graff

Yesterday I blogged about how ISC has been changing our internal development practices for BIND 9. Today, with the release of several security patches, I wanted to talk a bit on how they have helped us already.

Test-driven Development

In many projects, and previously in BIND 9, tests were written after the code was working. This left writing automated tests as an afterthought at best, and meant our tests were not as robust. One common problem was that the test didn’t actually test what we thought it did.

BIND 9 Development at ISC

30 Nov 2010
Michael Graff

ISC has begun implementing several methodology changes relating to BIND 9 development. The goals of these changes is to increase our software quality and relevance to you, our customers. Some of these are more internal, but we hope the outcome of these changes are that the effects are positive and noticed by those outside of ISC.

As with all changes, we’ll get some of it right and some we’ll have to revisit and modify as we learn. We welcome any feedback about where we are now, where you would like us to be, and as we progress along our path.

Why SQLite3?

19 Apr 2010
Michael Graff

There have been some questions about why BIND 10's first milestone release only supports SQLite3 for storing zone information. I hope I can answer some of the questions by explaining how and why we came to this decision.

Part of the decision was a simple matter of time. We knew we would only have resources to implement a single data store. We ended up implementing two, but one is a trivial one: authors.bind and other static zone content.

That explains why we chose to implement only one, but why was it SQLite3?

Surprise bugs and release schedules

10 Feb 2010
By Michael Graff

I know this won’t be a shock to anyone, but software has bugs.

Sometimes they are discovered and have little real impact — perhaps a few lines of code change and are easily tested. Ideally they occur early in a release cycle so they don’t really affect much. Most of the time these are minor and are easily put into a release at any point.