Online gamblingfirmBetfairis investing in automated
debugging software to speed up in-house system development and
control the quality of outsourced code.
The company, which plans to use Fortify's Source Code Analysis
(SCA) to check code against a list of known software errors,
expects the project to pay for itself within three years.
"We expect to get two main benefits: clean code faster than
before, and better morale among coders," said Matt Young, Betfair's
engineering partner development director.
"Everyone knows code checking is a necessary evil, but no one
likes doing it. If we can eliminate a lot of the drudgery by using
an automated tool, the code checkers can investigate the more
interesting errors. That is a better use of their time."
SCA flags errors and offers an explanation of why it considers
there to be a bug. Users can add new bugs to the list, Young
said.
Betfair has 100 in-house programmers who look after about
1,000,000 lines of code, plus 10 to 20 outsourced coders on call
during busy periods. The teams constantly seek to improve system
uptime and cut the time it takes to process a bet.
Young said that Betfair does not use standard measures of
performance, such as so many lines of bug-free code per programmer
per day.
"The things that matter [to coders] are the things that matter
to the business. Everyone who works here knows that we measure
success by uptime and how fast we can process a bet. Because people
can bet while games are in progress, if we are down for a second,
we lose money," he said.
Betfair's main systems are based on Oracle's
PL/SQL language, but it also has systems written in Java, SQL
Server, C++ and .net. "We needed a tool that would cover all these
languages," said Young.