Guides to Testing, Analysis, and Optimization

Topics

• Testing
• Analysis
• Optimization

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Before you can optimize your program, you must first analyze it. Testing will help verify that your program produces the correct output. Analysis will identify where it can be improved. Optimization will make it run fast. These resources should help you find the hotspots in your code, and to design more efficient programs.

Testing

Testing Excellence has a good introductory tutorial in software testing. It teaches the fundamentals of testing, life cycle models, and testing techniques. Since a program must be correct before it can be optimized, you should definitely take testing to heart. In addition to the tutorial articles, the main site has posts about specific topics in solving problems in a particular language or utilizing software to conduct testing.

Tips for use:

• The articles are grouped into larger categories. It's helpful to start with the articles in the earlier categories, especially the fundamentals.
• There is a panel on the right hand side of the page with a list of high quality selected articles.
• The site provides sample quizzes from the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) exam.

Analysis

Abstract interpretation and static analysis is a course in static analysis. It provides a series of four lectures and an exam. Static analysis is performed on the source code to formally prove the correctness of the program. This is especially important in fields such as avionics and medical software. The lectures cover abstraction, abstract interpretation, the mechanics of static analysis, and applications of static analysis.

Tips for use:

• The lectures make use of set notation. If you are unfamiliar with set notation, I recommend that you use Wikipedia's list of mathematical symbols as a supplementary resource until you become familiar with the concepts and symbols of set theory.
• At the end of each lecture, there is a list of references which make for excellent further reading.
• The lectures include examples that illustrate the concepts.

Optimization

Agner Fog's Software optimization resources provides five manuals for optimization of software. He covers optimization techniques for programs in C++ for Windows, Linux and Mac, and for programs in assembly. There are additional resources for testing and examination of test results, and a list of useful links to learn x86 assembly. He also links to the rest of his blog, which includes a forum where recent computer architecture developments are discussed.

Tips for use:

• Each guide is presented as a manual that can be downloaded in PDF format. The PDFs include hyperlinks in their table of contents to allow more rapid browsing when read electronically.
• Each manual also includes a list of literature for further education.