Almost thirty years ago, Linda Ott wrote a paper on a possible way to measure the quality of computer code. It was original, and exciting, but she's written a lot of papers since then in her career as a professor of computer science at
Michigan Technological University.
So she was a little surprised to find out recently that paper was honored with an award for the long-term impact it had on the field of software engineering.
The Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group of Software Engineering recognized the paper, titled "The Program Dependence Graph in a Software Development Environment," with its 2010 Retrospective Impact Award.
"I was flabbergasted," Ott says. "So I asked someone on the committee why that paper was selected, and she said it had formed the basis for a lot of research and has been used extensively in the formation of software development environments."
Ott co-authored the paper with Karl Ottenstein, and one of the groundbreaking things they did in it was to use a common computing tool called a program dependence graph to measure some aspects of software quality.
"Once we realized we could use it to evaluate quality, we knew it could be useful to programmers to incorporate quality," Ott says, and adds that in the long run is why the paper was honored. "When you improve software development, it improves the quality of programs--and the quality of programmers' lives."
The paper was originally published in the 1984 Proceedings of the group's software engineering symposium.
Writer: Sam Eggleston
Source: Linda Ott, Michigan Technological University
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