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…
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
Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?
41–50 of 166 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?
#42I 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.
You listed the reason it's a mess yourself - many people worked on it and it's old.
For big companies there is no incentive at all for a developer to personally care about and do battle over things like code quality and reduce complexity.
If they are use any kind of agile (lol) system, it will just be about polishing the turd so it doesn't break and add features in some way that doesn't require big rewrites.
Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Even with those caveats, it's unclear whether the premise is satisfied. The Linux kernel is old (old enough to drink!) large (and getting larger!) and supported by many people. Has its quality declined? I don't think so. It supports more hardware than ever. Kernel panics don't happen nearly as often as they used to. New features (BPF), make kernel programming easier. It's difficult to say that the Linux kernel's qual…
People being up the Linux kernel on the same way they bring up Oprah as an example of being successful in America.
99.99999% of software in big corporations will not have even 5% of the quality of the Linux kernel. The reason the kernel has such a high quality is because of Linux being a dictator, training everybody in not always so nice ways to write code that doesn't break anything and that is maintainable.
He cares about the code and he has the status and the mandate to prevent it from becoming shit.
Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?
#44>proper abstractions and commonly accepted software engineering best practices
Put 10 senior developers in the room, ask them a question about those practices. You'll probably get 8 variations on a mainstream approach and 2 alternative approaches.
As I'm often switching around stacks I'm shocked how lacking automated tooling is at enforcing basic formatting guidelines in some languages, IMO JavaScript prettify is the best here - it offers so practically no room for subjective tweaks.
For example I'm currently working in C# and it's so much worse in this regard, formatters between IDEs aren't even compatible.
So if something as trivial as formatting is this hard what do you think enforcing style guides and other quality metrics takes ?
In a small young team you can have one or more people steering the ship but when they move on or add more new people even in the best case these guys are trying to guess what the previous team would do to maintain style
Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?
#45I think you mean "code quality" is always decreasing. The more people that touch a codebase, the lower the code quality gets. As soon as you get more than one person involved, the conceptual integrity and code consistency begins to breakdown. Even with a single individual, if they stop working on the code for a long time, then code quality will decrease when they resume development. The very best codebases are the pr…
This also matches my perspective. I was too cavaliere to make reference to software quality when in fact, I'm more curious about code quality. I think the implicit nature of the problem is a central component - because conceptual integrity can only be achieved (or maintained) through a greater appreciation for what is implicit vs explicit.
As such, perhaps its an unworthy goal to maintain high code quality over the long-term.
Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?
#46> Does anyone know of examples of codebases (public or private) that have maintained a high quality codebase that is large, old, or supported by a large number of contributors?
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, the Linux kernel
Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?
#47If I was to guess, I think a lot of it has to do with the transitory nature of so many software jobs coupled with investor pressure to deliver and get ROI. Engineers are switching jobs every couple of years so projects have a constant in stream of new engineers and a constant out stream of tribal knowledge. Very few people are given the proper time to spin up and really learn the codebase, they are given a brief walk through and then expected to start closing tickets. This is how short cuts and not following best habits sneak in. The business side also has immense pressure to start making money so this pressure impacts the software delivery schedule forcing more features into each sprint. Worked at a company where the schedule was always intense but a ton of bugs were making it to production so we decided to introduce unit testing. We all attempted to start learning the new unit testing approach and started on it, but then the pressure from above to deliver features ramped up and the unit tests turned into useless stubs. Couple months later they just ceased to exist. Common response will be to push back and say no but that's not so easy to do in practice when you have to deliver your tickets for the sprint or get pipped. While it may not be so extreme everywhere I bet some aspect of this pressure exists in most places. If not, please let me know where and I will apply :)
This is all my anecdotal experience, I could be totally wrong in the grand scheme of things.
Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?
#48almost as in the old joke:
- there is constant/limited quantity intellect on earth, but the population is growing...
there is constant/limited ability to grasp things, but the things and complexity that (piece of) software represents, grows..
Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?
#49> Does anyone know of examples of codebases (public or private) that have maintained a high quality codebase that is large, old, or supported by a large number of contributors? FreeBSD, OpenBSD, the Linux kernel
I think that open source software (like Linux distros) may be the best examples because they tend to avoid the traditional "business problems" that I initially referenced in my question. But could these same contribution and management methods work for private enterprise? Maybe not...
Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?
#50Your ability to understand how bad software is has improved too. The ambition of software has increased in this same time. The industry is as a whole probably doing things better, for example - less ridiculous crunch periods at the organizations I've worked at.