Ok, you will say, the problems of 64-bit program versions are urgent. But how to detect all these mistakes?
It is impossible to give an exhaustive answer, but it is quite possible to give a number of recommendations that will make it possible to provide the safe migration to 64-bit systems and to provide a necessary level of reliability.
- Introduce the following articles to your colleagues who deal with the 64-bit applications development: [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15].
- Introduce to your colleagues the methodology of the static code analyzer: [16, 17, 18]. The static code verification is one of the best ways of detecting errors of such kind. It make it possible to make sure of workability even of those parts of the code, the work of which is difficult to be modeled at large data volumes, for example while using unit-tests methodology.
- It will be useful for developers to get acquainted with such static analyzers as Parasoft C++test (www.parasoft.com), Gimpel Software PC-lint (www.gimpel.com), Abraxas Software CodeCheck (www.abxsoft.com).
- For Window applications developers it will be especially useful to get acquainted with the specialized static analyzer Viva64 (www.viva64.com) rated at LLP64 data model [19].
- Upgrade the system of unit-testing having included the processing of large arrays in the set of tests. You may get a more detailed information about the necessity of at the large data volumes in [9], and also to learn how to better organize the testing.
- To execute carefully manual testing of the ported code at the real difficult tasks that use 64-bit systems possibilities. The change of the architecture is a very considerable change to rely on the automated testing systems completely.
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