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Welcome to Tools of the Trade

This podcast of an ongoing IEEE Software column explores the interplay between you, the software practitioner, and the tools you apply to the development problems you face. Skilled craftsmen set themselves apart from amateurs by the tools they use and the way they employ them. As a professional, I feel I'm getting a tremendous boost in my productivity by appropriately applying tools to the software construction problems I face every day. I also often find myself developing new tools, both for my personal use and for wider distribution. Column installments will discuss specific software construction activities from the standpoint of the tools we can employ — the tools of our trade. Future topics include editing, compiling, documentation, debugging, testing, configuration management, issue tracking, the development environment, tool building, and domain-specific tools. Of course, your suggestions are always welcome; email me at dds@aueb.gr. —Diomidis Spinellis

This podcast is brought to you by IEEE Software.

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Bug Busters
May 15, 2012 5:43 PM

Stringent quality control helps eliminate bugs. Tools can help prevent them from ending up in production code. We can use type-safe languages, heed compiler warnings, adopt specialized bug-finding tools, and adjust our code to locate bugs during testing.

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By Jennie Zhu
437 Views,
tools diomidis spinellis lint annotations bugs errors type checking
Project Asset Portability
April 27, 2012 9:59 AM

Source code makes up only a small part of a system's assets; we also have specs, design diagrams, build rules, version history, documentation, regression tests, and more. Chances are you dread even the thought of changing the tools you use.

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By Jennie Zhu
573 Views,
diomidis spinellis software engineering software development software tools portability project assets
Working with Unix Tools
March 14, 2012 10:33 AM

With modern shell command-line editing facilities, we can build commands bit by bit until they are exactly what we need. Nowadays, many systems offer the original Unix tools, so there's no reason not to add this approach to your arsenal.

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By Jennie Zhu
878 Views,
diomidis spinellis software tools unix tools line-oriented textual data stream software construction
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About the Speaker

Diomidis SpinellisDiomidis Spinellis is a professor in the Department of Management Science and Technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business and the author of Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective (Addison-Wesley, 2006). Contact him at dds@aueb.gr.