Phalanx (computer programming quality assurance technique)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To phalanx means to improve the quality of an existing body of computer programming code by an iterative process of editing the code's documentation, extending the code's test suite and refactoring the code itself on the basis of the documentation and testing. Phalanxing a body of code entails guaranteeing that the documentation constitutes an accurate specification of the code's current, non-deprecated functionality and that a very high proportion of statements in the code is reached ("covered") by the test suite.

phalanx is derived from the Phalanx project, a quality assurance project ([1]) founded by Andy Lester in 2003 to improve the quality of code found in extensions to the Perl programming language on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) ([2]).