Building better software with better tools

In recent years, one of the loudest ongoing complaints about computer technology has been about the poor quality of commercial software. With software becoming more complex and products becoming increasingly dependent on software, bugs are affecting more people and the level of consumer dissatisfaction has increased dramatically. With this in mind, three major companies-IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems-have started separate projects with different focuses but the same goal: to improve software quality with better tools. These efforts also attempt to reduce development costs and cut down on tedious debugging tasks. Each project automates the testing process so that programmers can find software errors at early stages of the development process, when it's less expensive to fix them.