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You are never taught how to build quality software

florianbellmann.com

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Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#131

Post by jimt1234 »

benwilson-512 wrote: post #98
datadeft wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spicy take on engineering. Why do we accept this for software when do not accept the same in other engineering domains?

My wife works as an acoustical consultant at a global construction firm. The things you hear about factories, offices, and even hospitals is wild. Don’t get me wrong the construction world works very hard to avoid issues but I think we in software tend to hold other engineering disciplines up on a pedestal that doesn’t quite match the messiness of reality.

Thanks for saying this. I think we in software engineering tend to think too binary: either the product is perfect (100% bug-free) or it's shit. There's always room for improvement, but compared to other engineering, overall, I think we're doing pretty good. As an example similar to your wife's, my friend used to work for one of the major car manufacturers doing almost the exact same job as Edward Norton's character in Fight Club. The cars had "bugs", they knew about it, but they didn't publicly acknowledge it until they were forced to.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#133

Post by duped »

bluGill wrote: post #116
duped wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a university is not providing both they are failing everyone. Why? > A pure university education without considering is this degree useful in the real world is a disservice to education. I think this line of thinking is a much bigger disservice to higher education. It was very tiresome as an undergraduate to be surrounded by people that thought this way - and detrimental to everyone's education. "I'll never use…

Because like it or not most people are going to university to get a better jobs. Companies like university educated people because they learn deep thinking. However they often come out lacking important skills that are needed. Sure there are a few going to university just for the fun of it. However most are expecting a job. Thus universities should train and emphasize thinking in more specific areas. > "I'll never us…

> However they often come out lacking important skills that are needed.

Companies that offer the jobs are the ones that need to offer the job training.

> (I think this is the point you were trying to make?)

Not really, it's that university education is kind of meta/self serving (the goal is not to train X number of students to do Y jobs, it's to give every student at the institution what that institution defines to be an education).

But like you said, the fact this produces better workers is a second-order effect. It's not the goal of most institutions. But not all institutions; some define "well educated" to have lots of industry practicum, and if you want that, go study at those institutions.

My main point is that it's not a "disservice" to eschew practicum or industry training as an educational institution.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#134

Post by mschuster91 »

bluGill wrote: post #116
duped wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a university is not providing both they are failing everyone. Why? > A pure university education without considering is this degree useful in the real world is a disservice to education. I think this line of thinking is a much bigger disservice to higher education. It was very tiresome as an undergraduate to be surrounded by people that thought this way - and detrimental to everyone's education. "I'll never use…

Because like it or not most people are going to university to get a better jobs. Companies like university educated people because they learn deep thinking. However they often come out lacking important skills that are needed. Sure there are a few going to university just for the fun of it. However most are expecting a job. Thus universities should train and emphasize thinking in more specific areas. > "I'll never us…

> Companies like university educated people because they learn deep thinking.

No. Companies love hiring higher-ed graduates because it removes a lot of cost and risk for them:

- hiring only people with degrees weeds out everyone unable to cope with a high-stress environment, for whatever reason - crucially, also including people who would normally be protected by ADA or its equivalent provisions in Europe.

- it weeds out people in relationships or with (young) children, which makes them easier to exploit and reduces the amount of unexpected time-off due to whatever bug is currently sweeping through kindergarten/school/whatever. Sure, eventually they will get into relationships and have children as they age, but looking at the age people start to have kids these days [0], that's a solid 5-10 years you can squeeze them for overtime.

- it saves companies a ridiculous amount of training. The old "tradespeople apprenticeship" way is very cost-intensive as you have to train them on virtually anything, not just stuff relevant to the job, e.g. using computers and common office software. Instead, the cost is picked up either by the taxpayer (in Europe) or by the students themselves in the form of college debt. The latter used to be reserved for high-paying jobs such as pilots who have to "work off" their training cost but got compensated really well, nowadays it's standard practice.

- it keeps the employee diversity relatively homogenous. There is a clear bias towards white and asian ethnicity in the US for higher ed [1], and among top-earning job, males still utterly dominate [2].

- related to the above, it also weeds out people from lower economic classes, although at least that trend has been seriously diminishing over the last decades [3].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir...

[1] https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-new-higher-ed-data-...

[2] https://www.bankrate.com/loans/student-loans/top-paying-coll...

[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/22/a-risin...

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#135

Post by NBJack »

ragnot wrote: post #86
withinboredom wrote: post #82

First, define quality software. I'll wait.

I'll take a stab. Quality software is software that is testable, able to adapt to new features and is architected to match the current organizational structure of the software team so that communication and dependencies don't have an impedance mismatch.

Good start, but too broad and open for interpretation.

- Who gets to define testability?

- I want to add a coffee maker to my crash test dummy; is the lack of room for the filter and water tank a sign of a bad design? Or not flexible enough for my feature?

- (cue meme) "You guys have organizational structure?"

- Who gets to claim the impedence mismatch? What are those consequences? Wait, where are the dependencies defined again outside of the software?

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#136

Post by underlipton »

Gare wrote: post #108
codegeek wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. If you have written production grade software at real companies, you know that the moment you make that new commit (even if 1 liner change), you are now ready to accept that it could break something. yes you can do your unit tests, integration test, User Acceptance Tests and what not. But every code change = new possible bug that you may not be able to catch until it occurs to a customer. Whenever I hear a devel…

How about a formal proof? :) I jest, but that should be the gold standard for anything life-critical and good to have for mission-critical software. Alas, we're not there yet.

Oh, boy, I get to post this again:

https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#137

Post by akhosravian »

Gare wrote: post #108
codegeek wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. If you have written production grade software at real companies, you know that the moment you make that new commit (even if 1 liner change), you are now ready to accept that it could break something. yes you can do your unit tests, integration test, User Acceptance Tests and what not. But every code change = new possible bug that you may not be able to catch until it occurs to a customer. Whenever I hear a devel…

How about a formal proof? :) I jest, but that should be the gold standard for anything life-critical and good to have for mission-critical software. Alas, we're not there yet.

I’m not a CS academic or a mathematician, but don’t Godel’s incompleteness theorems preclude a formal proof of correctness?

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#138

Post by cochne »

Gare wrote: post #108
codegeek wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. If you have written production grade software at real companies, you know that the moment you make that new commit (even if 1 liner change), you are now ready to accept that it could break something. yes you can do your unit tests, integration test, User Acceptance Tests and what not. But every code change = new possible bug that you may not be able to catch until it occurs to a customer. Whenever I hear a devel…

How about a formal proof? :) I jest, but that should be the gold standard for anything life-critical and good to have for mission-critical software. Alas, we're not there yet.

I never really got how proofs are supposed to solve this issue. I think that would just move the bugs from the code into the proof definition. Your code may do what the proof says, but how do you know what the proof says is what you actually want to happen?

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#139

Post by duped »

sanderjd wrote: post #104
duped wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that higher education isn't job training and doesn't pretend to be, and people who think it is or should are the ones that need education the most because they don't seem to get it.

> and doesn't pretend to be I'm not sure about this part... A very common pattern in my conversations with working class friends and family from my parents' generation is: "we were told that if we sent our kids to college, they'd have better lives than we did, but instead we all just ended up with more debt than we could handle". It's tricky! If you tell teenagers and their parents the truth - this purely academic pr…

> I'm not sure about this part...

If you want to know what a university will teach your kids, ask them. They'll even tell you without asking them - it was pretty obvious to me as a dumb high school kid on campus visits what the emphasis of one program or another was going to be.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#140

Post by Xeamek »

groestl wrote: post #118
Xeamek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not moving a goalpost. Running a program less then 100 times total, across all its user, is just very little for anything that could be considered commercial. That really isn't a controversial statement. So I am simply excluding this category as an extremum.

> Running a program less then 100 times total, across all its user, is just very little for anything that could be considered commercial Running that kind of software for the central bank here. So kind of disputing your statement. > So I am simply excluding this category as an extremum. Which ignores the long tail. Great approach.

What software are you running that gets less then 100 usages before it gets retired?

>Great aproach

Unironically better, then trying to make prescriptions as broad and general as possible, because those usually are too generic to carry any actual value

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