Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#101

Post by quanticle » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:52 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #90

quanticle wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Linux kernel is an easy example, sure, but it's not the only one. You can say the same thing about proprietary operating systems and software as well. It's been a long time since I've had misbehaving applications blue-screen Windows. That's something that used to happen daily when I ran Windows 98. Or if you prefer MacOS, I remember MacOS Lion being incredibly unstable, with beach-balls and crashes galore. That's…

Regarding games, I wonder if it is just an issue of expectations. For the longest time, AAA studios mostly released simple first person shooters with straightforward enemy AI and simple physics. And Bethesda and Obsidian released gloriously buggy RPGs. Nowadays, every game includes open world elements, RPG elements, and more complicated NPC interactions... and it turns out that they are all full of bugs. Complex game…

Not to mention all these RPG systems add a whole additional layer to mess up -- character stats might not be 'buggy' exactly, but they might be very poorly 'balanced.'

I'm not talking about balance issues. I'm specifically talking about issues where the game is clearly and obviously not working as designed. Clipping errors. Objects flying off into the sky because of problems with collision detection. Textures not loading. NPCs walking facefirst into walls because of buggy pathing code.

I think what's happened is that game development studios' reach has exceeded their grasp. They want to make these huge open worlds with numerous storylines, quests, etc, all with rich graphics and physics, but they just don't have the time or budget to get it right. So they rush out what they have, knowing full well that it has massive numbers of untested corner cases and hope that the PR blowback from the bugs isn't so bad that it ruins their reputation.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#102

Post by john_moscow » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:58 PM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #26

Software quality has been increasing for as long as I've been in the business. However, the complexity, scale, and defect surface of software has been increasing at least as quickly. We've invested the systemic gains in quality to expand the capabilities of what software can reasonably do instead of polishing the software we wrote 20+ years ago. This was the right choice in most cases. The software from a few decades…

I think, there are different aspects of quality. What you are referring to is the increased adoption of unit standardized techniques (unit tests, abstractions, continuous integration, etc). What the OP was referring to is the reduced understanding by the developers of why they are using each technique, and increased leanings towards just copy-pasting something from StackOverflow, or blindly cargo-culting something that a neighboring team does.

It is somewhat similar to all other economies of scale. Like AdWords, where you are one click away of being connected to thousands of ad publishers, but if the algorithm says "no", you get banned and will never get a chance to talk to a person. Like modern electronics where you can buy a device assembled in Philippines from parts made in China and designed in the U.S. for a fraction of a price of making it locally, but if a single $0.08 capacitor blows up, you're stuck throwing the entire thing out because the pipeline is not optimized for repairs.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#103

Post by HellDunkel » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 11:01 PM UTC

I have worked as a software dev for about 10 years before i turned towards freelancing and slowly gravitated away from programming. I felt very much like you and tended to be rather annoyed by what and how things were done. Much later i was lucky to be able to work on a software project with just one other developer doing no coding myself but at all the things that i thought were not getting enough attention in previous projects. mainly: testing and design. Turns out this is the most exciting, appealing and usefull piece of software i ever contributed to and although i wrote very little code i am super proud of it. The codebase is quite ok, not too big (150k), not too clean. But the fact that this thing just WORKS and is FAST is extremely rewarding. So for me the best thing to do was step aside and try approach things from a different angle.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#104

Post by mattchamb » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 11:01 PM UTC

vsareto wrote: post #78

streetcat1 wrote: post #4

Reasons: 1. The software creation process moved from designing software to "growing" software. With iteration time moving from months to weeks. So there is no conceptual integrity. 2. MVP turning to final products. Basically quick and dirty code become the foundation of the architecture, with no time to refactor. 3. Short tenure time. I think that avg tenure time for young developers is less than a year. Hence, the k…

I’ll try to add to this great list: 5. Planning - your abstractions sometimes don’t make sense in the face of new requirements. If the people planning the features of the product don’t do their own thinking, you’ll be guessing at what they’re going to do next. When that’s the case, it’s up to a dice roll to see if your abstractions will work nicely with the future requirements.

This is biting me right now and quality will suffer as a result.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#105

Post by bee_rider » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 11:05 PM UTC

quanticle wrote: post #101

bee_rider wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding games, I wonder if it is just an issue of expectations. For the longest time, AAA studios mostly released simple first person shooters with straightforward enemy AI and simple physics. And Bethesda and Obsidian released gloriously buggy RPGs. Nowadays, every game includes open world elements, RPG elements, and more complicated NPC interactions... and it turns out that they are all full of bugs. Complex game…

Not to mention all these RPG systems add a whole additional layer to mess up -- character stats might not be 'buggy' exactly, but they might be very poorly 'balanced.' I'm not talking about balance issues. I'm specifically talking about issues where the game is clearly and obviously not working as designed. Clipping errors. Objects flying off into the sky because of problems with collision detection. Textures not loa…

I 100% agree -- the balance issues just popped into my head as a tangent. Another example of how engines and rendering improve over time but there are lots of sort of 'other problems' that really don't scale with technology advancements.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#106

Post by tick_tock_tick » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 11:05 PM UTC

redisman wrote: post #66

phendrenad2 wrote: post #11

Software quality is suffering because we don't have software problems anymore. You can't make a new operating system, or make a new compiler, and make money. Those areas have been filled, and, software is evergreen so you can just port it to new hardware. What we have are social problems, people problems, "disruption" to existing industries, etc. This is software "eating the world" (because it ran out of software pro…

OS is a good example. Recent MacOS and Linux are easily the highest quality OSes that have existed. iOS and Android are quite good too. Unless you go back to when OSes could be extremely simple.

> Recent MacOS

Is an example of a system going downhill fast. Critical bugs making it though whole beta into the final release. Hell remember https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-patches-severe-macos-big... from just last year?

MacOS quality has been on the decline as the focus has shifted to iOS.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#107

Post by Wowfunhappy » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 11:06 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #94

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. I'd absolutely pay for software that faster and more reliably than $electronAppOfTheDay, and which didn't require updates every two weeks. Maybe I wouldn't pay mars rover money, but surely there's a balance somewhere in the middle. There are economy of scale issues to consider though. I use OneDrive because everyone else at my company has files stored in OneDrive. Still, I think my company collectively…

Whoever makes that paid software has to compete with the free software. Which means that customers end up with a choice: crap, but works well enough and is free, quality that works well but costs $50-500. The various mobile app stores have produced a pretty effective demonstration that people (as a general rule) will happily accept garbage apps for $0 or $0.99 or 2 minutes of ads for every 30 seconds of use rather th…

I'm not arguing you're wrong, but I'd like to harp on one point:

> The various mobile app stores have produced a pretty effective demonstration that people (as a general rule) will happily accept garbage apps for $0 or $0.99 or 2 minutes of ads for every 30 seconds of use rather than paying even $5 for better software.

Those stores have also been set up in such a way that buying expensive software doesn't make any sense. I'm not super familiar with the Play Store, but at least in the App Store:

1. Developers can't offer free trials, so I have no way to test out an app and see if it's worth $$$$$.

2. Developers can't offer upgrade pricing, so I may have to pay the full entry price again in a couple of years, particularly because...

3. Apple's yearly OS updates break or create bugs in existing apps all the time, which means no amount of up-front developer testing can ensure a truly stable or long-lasting end product. These iOS updates are required to continue receiving security patches, and if I upgrade and discover a critical app broke, downgrading is impossible in almost all cases.

So yes, I almost never pay more than $5 for anything in the App Store, because the ecosystem is built to ensure anything else is a bad investment.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#108

Post by strictfp » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 11:06 PM UTC

In my opinion we need to ditch the old idea of hiring more people to speed up feature delivery, and focus more on streamlining the codebase and making it easy to make changes to it.

Adding more manpower works around an inefficient codebase by writing more code on the side, and so we get a growing Rube Goldberg machine, no matter if we do monolith or 4000 microservices.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#109

Post by Jtsummers » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 11:10 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #107

Jtsummers wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoever makes that paid software has to compete with the free software. Which means that customers end up with a choice: crap, but works well enough and is free, quality that works well but costs $50-500. The various mobile app stores have produced a pretty effective demonstration that people (as a general rule) will happily accept garbage apps for $0 or $0.99 or 2 minutes of ads for every 30 seconds of use rather th…

I'm not arguing you're wrong, but I'd like to harp on one point: > The various mobile app stores have produced a pretty effective demonstration that people (as a general rule) will happily accept garbage apps for $0 or $0.99 or 2 minutes of ads for every 30 seconds of use rather than paying even $5 for better software. Those stores have also been set up in such a way that buying expensive software doesn't make any se…

> 1. Developers can't offer free trials, so I have no way to test out an app and see if it's worth $$$$$.

Yes they can. Via in app purchases, they can offer a reduced set of features for free, and the full set for money. As an example, I have Working Copy (free) but have (twice now) done the in app purchase to unlock "pro" features because I've found enough utility in the software. It will work without the purchase, though, and is perfectly fine (no one, in person, that I've recommended it to has ever paid for it, but still use it).

> 2. Developers can't offer upgrade pricing, so I may have to pay the full entry price again in a couple of years, particularly because...

At least some have worked this out. Buying OmniFocus 3 (?) with OmniFocus 2 (?) still installed on your device got you a discounted price. I'm pretty sure that Scrivener did the same, but don't quote me on that. I purchased it a long time ago.

> 3. Apple's yearly OS updates break or create bugs in existing apps all the time, which means no amount of up-front developer testing can ensure a truly stable or long-lasting end product. These iOS updates are required to continue receiving security patches, and if I upgrade and discover a critical app broke, downgrading is impossible in almost all cases.

That I can't disagree with.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#110

Post by oblio » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 11:15 PM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #80

trinovantes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely feels like survivorship bias. We only remember the good software of the past while forgetting the hundreds of buggy mess created by companies that are probably defunct by now

I wonder if people are forgetting that not long ago, it was acceptable and normal that your word processor could have a bug in it which would crash the entire OS. Or how almost everything was insecure by default.

Or your email client would open and execute every file attached and it would do so with root permissions.