March 17th is Saint Patrick’s day, a celebration for the Patron Saint of Software Quality Engineers. Today will be a great day to lift a glass for your efforts in chasing snakes out of your software.

Of course, Saint Patrick lived before computers and software (he died in 464 AD).  He is known as the patron saint of engineers because he brought innovations to the way churches were constructed in Ireland. Saint Patrick is more famous for chasing the serpents out of Ireland.

Imagine if Grace Hopper found a small snake, instead of a moth, in the Mark II computer, we might call defects “snakes” instead of bugs. In this world, the connection to software quality and Saint Patrick would then be more direct.

Who better to represent software quality than the man who chased all of the serpents out of Ireland?

SQLite is a database engine that is embedded in a number of other application. For example, Mozilla uses SQLite to manage cookies. Being embedded, its important to have a small footprint and be very performant and resilient.

The testing practices for SQLite are very thorough, covering many types of testing in the automated suite. There are 91493 KLOC of test code in total.  The distribution package is built from 89.9 KLOC of C code.  That is 1017 lines of test code for every line of production code.

Inspired by the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast, I’ll be sharing several interesting (to me) testing related facts in this space.