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Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

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Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#4

This is how I feel about most "things I hate". Despite my strong feelings towards them, there's a reason why they are the way that they are. Almost always it comes down to my interests & priorities not aligning with reality/everyone else.

To some extent hating stuff that frankly has no reason to exist is by definition temporal, it only lasts until the thing rightfully stops existing.

To really grind someone's gears they'd need to hate something that cannot simply go away.

Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#5
Valentina's original blog post is easily misinterpreted. She is correct that quality is optional. Obviously so, many companies do fine with very poor quality software.

But something being mandatory or not doesn't influence the ROI. Something can be optional and high ROI or mandatory and low ROI. Low quality software is quite destructive over the long term and it is a horrible mistake to let coders go wild writing buggy software slowly.

That being said, the post is probably clickbait aimed at promoting her services. I doubt many people would make the mistake of thinking it a good idea to purposefully low quality written at slow speed.

Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#6
Both this article and the one it references only seem to provide more evidence that the descent into mediocrity of the software industry is certainly happening. That said, there's a difference between actual quality, and "quality" as popularised by metrics-driven dogma.

Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#7
> You know what I haven’t seen? not once in 15 years?

> A company going under.

What a wild assertion: The OP hasn’t personally seen a company fail, and therefore software quality doesn’t matter? Bugs and slow delivery are fine?

It’s trivially easy to find counterexamples of companies failing because their software products were inferior to newcomers who delivered good results, fast development, and more stable experience. Startups fail all the time because their software isn’t good enough or isn’t delivered before the runway expires. The author is deliberately choosing to ignore this hard reality.

I think the author may have been swept up in big, slow companies that have so much money that they can afford to have terrible software development practices and massive internal bloat. Stay in this environment long enough and even the worst software development practices start to feel “normal” because you look around and nothing bad has happened yet.

Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#8

Both this article and the one it references only seem to provide more evidence that the descent into mediocrity of the software industry is certainly happening. That said, there's a difference between actual quality, and "quality" as popularised by metrics-driven dogma.

Example for the last point: people seem to have forgotten how much of a "quality" shitshow was Twitter. The thing was written in Ruby on Rails, downtime was normal and expected by everyone. Yet the platform thrived and the username grew. Or Facebook, the page didn't fully load like 30% of the time, meaning that at least one panel was broken, some picture was missing, etc.

Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#9

Both this article and the one it references only seem to provide more evidence that the descent into mediocrity of the software industry is certainly happening. That said, there's a difference between actual quality, and "quality" as popularised by metrics-driven dogma.

Always worth remembering the adage that you can't inspect quality into a product.

Which, interestingly, wasn't something a software engineer came up with.

Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#10

Both this article and the one it references only seem to provide more evidence that the descent into mediocrity of the software industry is certainly happening. That said, there's a difference between actual quality, and "quality" as popularised by metrics-driven dogma.

A blog with ads every few paragraphs isn’t where we’ll find writers with standards.
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