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Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

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

#111

Post by com2kid »

timhrothgar wrote: post #5
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

I don’t really agree with your premise. Software quality wasn’t pristine a few decades ago. It wasn’t hard to find messy codebases, apps that barely worked, and developers who simply fumbled their way through code until something compiled. If anything, it feels like common softest quality has trended upwards as software engineering learning materials have become more widely and freely available across the internet an…

Perhaps I should update the question. I'm not referring to ALL software quality. I'm referring to the quality of codebases that are 1) old, 2) large, and 3) supported by many people. You make a good point though. Perhaps I just miss the good ol' days of working on small teams with small codebases that were pretty easily maintained.

> Perhaps I should update the question. I'm not referring to ALL software quality. I'm referring to the quality of codebases that are 1) old, 2) large, and 3) supported by many people.

Because Google[1] and Facebook came along and scared everyone by iterating at a LOLWTF pace and companies in surrounding spaces looked at what was taking up time in their release schedules and the answer was "test passes" so they fired all their testers, and told devs to add unit tests but unit tests don't cut it.

Companies that used to have immaculate software quality had dedicated test automation engineers who had the job of abusing software in crazy bizarre ways. Then they hired armies of manual testers to go over anything that hadn't been automated.

Lots of problems existing with this system, one of which was career advancement for software engineers in test was limited because it is hard to get recognized for the two primary jobs of an SDET:

Signing off on code

Blocking a release on quality grounds

So you had a gradual rot of SDET and test orgs at companies, with pools of brilliance that slowly got drained as the best engineers got tired of being undervalued.

Start from that base, and then around ~2010 everything needs to start "moving fast".

Apple and MS both get rid of their test teams, and with two of the largest employers of dedicated software engineers in test getting out of the field, the entire field itself falls apart. Now it is career suicide, an ever shrinking career path that pays far less than doing "real" development work.

That leaves us at where we are today. Everything sucks and breaks all the time.

[1] Everyone forgets how bad the first 5 major versions of Android were.

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

#112

Post by sirmarksalot »

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 think companies are generally willing to pay money for software, but the things they're willing to pay money for are generally not the things that would make their employees' lives easier. Employees value reliability, ease of use, and speed, while the companies themselves value integration with other systems and ISO compliance.

Atlassian software is not good, and it is not cheap, but it does offer an end-to-end story for the rigid workflows encouraged by many investors.

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

#114

Post by tcgv »

Entropy. By adding new features to a system it's complexity can only stay the same or increase. Complexity can only go down if we take time to refactor the codebase. Adding new features is cheap and quick, refactoring is usually expensive and slow, hence software entropy, which somewhat relates to quality, usually goes up and up.

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

#115

Post by wanderr »

I agree that it’s a business problem. Cost, prioritization, rapid hiring, promotion incentives all play a part. Nobody usually funds a project to go through and clean up code. My last two jobs before I went fully down the management track, I deleted 100k-200k lines of code by applying static analysis, deleting obviously dead code, finding obviously broken code and figuring out whether it was being used (thankfully it mostly wasn’t, in the few cases where it was I could replace it with calls to properly working methods that already existed). I consistently deleted more code than I ever wrote, but every time I deleted code it was on a personal whim, not because it was a funded activity, even though it also improved productivity (engineers wasting time maintaining dead code). Once a codebase reaches a certain size, it’s not realistic for someone to get comfortable enough with the entire codebase and how everything interacts to be confident that major changes won’t have unintended consequences, so even if someone wants to go rogue and do a major cleanup effort, they will only get so far.

Now I try to make sure my team has time allocated to paying down technical debt, but most of the time that is enough to keep the situation from getting worse, more than really improving the situation.

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

#116

Post by daniel-cussen »

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…

> Complex games have complex problems that don't reveal themselves until players do weird things.

If you don't think them through they will. Just write it right.

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

#117

Post by daniel-cussen »

wanderr wrote: post #115

I agree that it’s a business problem. Cost, prioritization, rapid hiring, promotion incentives all play a part. Nobody usually funds a project to go through and clean up code. My last two jobs before I went fully down the management track, I deleted 100k-200k lines of code by applying static analysis, deleting obviously dead code, finding obviously broken code and figuring out whether it was being used (thankfully it…

Yeah so Don Knuth says if you want a measure of productivity add the amount of code that's written to the amount of code that's deleted. In the same vein, make one to throw away. Final concept from Knuth: 1 in 50 people have the "computer scientist's mindset".

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

#119

Post by sowbug »

PaulHoule wrote: post #10

Software systems were simpler back in the day. Steve Wozniak 'coded' Breakout in 45 chips on a circuit board, then coded it in assembly and coded it again in BASIC to prove somebody could. There was a limit to how big of a program you could fit in an Apple ][. A modern game could have a development budget more than a Hollywood movie and fill a whole Blu-Ray disc. From one perspective it is a miracle of progress that…

Because systems were simpler, the teams that produced them were simpler, too. In the 1980s it was common for one person to have developed an entire commercial program. Just take a look at The Giant List of Classic Game Programmers (https://dadgum.com/giantlist/) and note how many amazing games were written by just one person. It's a lot easier to QA a program when you wrote the entire thing and can manually test it in a few minutes.

But simpler has its cost. Whenever I fire up an emulator to relive my childhood Apple II days, I'm amazed how crude that stuff was. I remember magical worlds and incredible, fast animations. Today they're just flickering 16x16 blobs.

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

#120

Post by cblconfederate »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

I don’t really agree with your premise. Software quality wasn’t pristine a few decades ago. It wasn’t hard to find messy codebases, apps that barely worked, and developers who simply fumbled their way through code until something compiled. If anything, it feels like common softest quality has trended upwards as software engineering learning materials have become more widely and freely available across the internet an…

Most of the "client"/desktop software does the same things that it did in 1997. Most/all of the 'advanced' features such as AI/voice recognition are done server-side because reasons.

If the quality of desktop software was going up, it would be doing more than it did in 1997. I don't think it does, in fact it is being dumbed down to look like mobile software (which is inherently lower quality due to limited UI). So how come the quality is going up but the user benefit (i.e. time it saves) has not changed?

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