On Thu, 05 May 2005 18:31:38 EDT, Dave Aronson said:

> could have a very lengthy thread trying (in vain) to define the exact
> differences between:
>
> - programmers (and whether it should have one m or two)
> - coders
> - systems analysts
> - software engineers
(yadda yadda)

One possibly useful metric is that the ability of automated checkers to detect
flaws is related to the level of abstraction the flaw is at.

Errors made at the coder level (fencepost errors, buffer overruns, double free()
errors, dereferencing after free(), and so on) are for the most part detectable
by automated means (C checkers like Splint, and languages like Java detect many
of them at runtime).

The next level up are errors like API issues - was the caller required to verify
the data passed, or does the called function have to do it? Who frees the memory
that a function malloc()s? These are usually *not* expressible in the language
as part of the API, and usually hand-checking of code is needed to find these
bugs (although automated checkers are making progress here).

At the top are errors at the systems analysis level - where conceptual errors
in the specifications introduce flaws and vulnerabilities. These are almost
impossible to detect automagically....

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