Visual Studio 2010 helps take the 'smells' out of software development

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 15 April 2010 16:05

Business IT - Technology

Microsoft reckons Visual Studio 2010 can eliminate wasted effort in software development and maintenance, and also help fix the 'smells' that indicate that a project maybe going bad.

"Every software project gets unhappy in its own way," according to Sam Guckenheimer, group product planner for Visual Studio at Microsoft, and Visual Studio 2010 is intended to address the signs of unhappiness.

"We're trying to get rid of all that waste" associated with struggling to understand existing systems, implementation that doesn't match the design, developer/tester "ping-pong" (aka non-reproducible bug reports), and a lack of visibility into project progress.

One of the main goals of Visual Studio 2010 is "no more butterfly effects," Guckenheimer said, referring to the situation where a small change made to fix a bug in a piece of code can have a catastrophic effect elsewhere in the program.

The use of layer diagrams helps communicate the design intent and later helps check the implementation against the design. Visual Studio 2010 allows developers to jump between layer diagrams and the code, and also incorporates UML support.

Guckenheimer says that 80 to 90% of the time, maintenance programmers were not part of the original development team, so it is important that the development suite can show the relationships to help preserve the quality of the code "so people can't do bad things out of ignorance."

Page 2: how Visual Studio 2010 makes it easier for developers to fix bugs uncovered by testers.