The next generation of consumer electronics products is likely to fall foul of major programming errors as the amount of software code in such products continues to double every two years. According to UK software quality specialists Programming Research Ltd, based in Hersham, Surrey, the electronics and other consumer industries are set to be marred by the same error rates and performance issues affecting the computer industry. Such levels of performance will not be tolerated by the mass market, said the company, and product recalls or customer complaints in the commercial sector are inevitable. Paul Blundell, managing director of Programming Research, estimated that the next generation of electric razors will have 7,000 lines of code in them, while large-screen televisions will have more than 200,000 lines. The company has been finding an error rate of one fault in every 55 lines of executable C software code. While it’s acceptable today for a person’s word processor to crash once or twice a month, that same person will not accept their television malfunctioning even once a month, said Blundell. The company said that static inspection, common in every other engineering discipline, will highlight the obvious faults and inconsistencies before software is even compiled. It said 40% of all software errors are preventable and statistically detectable. It has its own static testing products, QA C and QA C++, but also acts as a clearing house for software reliability issues. Founder Les Hatton is the author of Safer C, on writing C code for high-availability and safety critical systems. The tools run on most Unixes, including IBM Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Digital Equipment Corp Alpha, with a personal computer version due by the end of the year. Prices start from ú4,500. US distributors include Asta Inc in Massachusetts, and Software Solutions Inc in Houston, Texas.
