For handling bugs, Cristina Cifuentes, a senior staff engineer in Sun Labs discusses "the Parfait Project." The Parfait Project is named after the dessert because it takes a multi-layered approach to bug checking. The building of this layered bug checker is an attempt at providing an efficient tool for checking bugs and reducing the amount of time spent. "I talked to the Solaris security group, the Java security group, the QA guys and so on, just to see what their experiences were," she says, "and the feedback was pointing to the fact that a lot of the tools do not scale well."

Cifuentes explained some tools that ran quickly, "roughly 50 percent were false positives." This takes a lot of time to sift through. Then, she explained how the Parfait Project works and described its unique approach.

The layered concept suggests that by eliminating the easy bugs first, it makes it easier to find the harder ones. This way, you avoid wasting time on expensive analysis, according to Cifuentes. By getting the easy bugs out of the way quickly, you free up time to find the harder ones. "If you apply one of the more expensive analysis to try to find everything," Cifuentes says, "you are wasting computing time."

Cifuentes and her group are located in the "Labs Down Under", which is an outpost of Sun Labs in Brisbane, Australia. Considering that there were no standard bug-checking tools, Cifuentes and her colleagues prepared an "accuracy suite." They created a picture of real-world programs with bug kernals taken from available open-source code.

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Building a Better Bug-Checker - Contrarian Minds Series: Cristina Cifuentes, senior staff engineer, Sun Labs

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