You are never taught how to build quality software • Hacker News Board

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#261

Post by codegeek » Fri, Dec 08, 2023, 11:25 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #198

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…

It's always amazing when I get a bug report from a product that's been running bug free in production for years with minimal changes but some user did some combination of things that had never been done and it blows up. Usually it's something extremely simple to fix too.

This happens a lot more than one may think especially with products that have lot of features. Some features are used sparingly and the moment a customer uses that feature a bit more in depth, boom. Something is broken.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#262

Post by JumpinJack_Cash » Fri, Dec 08, 2023, 11:26 PM UTC

WJW wrote: post #180

Syntonicles wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will you please elaborate?

Aviation in particular has a very strong culture around (government mandated) checklists and post-crash investigations. This has both pros and cons. The pros is that every airline learns from the mistakes made by every other airline and over time the system becomes really quite safe indeed. The cons are that it is quite expensive and time consuming. Imagine if every software company was obliged by law to: - Every sin…

> > Aviation in particular has a very strong culture around (government mandated) checklists and post-crash investigations

That's the reason why aviation can only shine when it becomes a private means of transportation, and I don't mean 70mm private jets but, 150k light helicopters.

When a critical mass is hit then accidents will become no more traumatic to the collective psyche than car accidents, the lighter the aircraft the better because it would seem exactly like a car crash as opposed to leaving a huge burning hole into the ground

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#263

Post by BoiledCabbage » Fri, Dec 08, 2023, 11:28 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #164

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the thing, though: Of a CS graduating class, 90% of them will work as software engineers, not as computer scientists. (All numbers made up, but I think they're about right.) We don't need these things to be electives. We don't need them to be a master's program. We need an undergraduate software engineering program, and we need 90% of the people in CS to switch to that program instead.

I agree with you! It's hard to change curricula because there are so many competing interests. CS is an evolving field and things like machine learning have burst onto the stage, clamoring for attention. There is also an age-old debate about whether CS departments are trade schools, math departments, or science. Personally I think software engineering skills are paramount for 90% of graduates. How do we fit this into…

> There is also an age-old debate about whether CS departments are trade schools, math departments, or science. Personally I think software engineering skills are paramount for 90% of graduates.

The question as well is: are Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Materials Engineering trade schools?

I think it's a key call out as CS touches on so many things.

There are arguments for it being math, science, engineering, a trade school or a combination of the above.

And then if you separate them out completely you end up with people doing CS being out of touch with what happens in the real world and vice versa.

I think in the end you probably need to have a single overall degree with a specialization in (Programming as Engineering, Programming as Math and Programming as Computer Science,) with lots of overlap in the core.

And then you still can have a both a bootcamp style trade school.

Now all of that said, that still doesn't solve the CS equivalent of "Math for business majors". Or the equivalent of "Programming for Scientists", or the like which is already a really important case to offer. Where you major in Bio/Chem/Other but being able to apply programming to your day job is important. Although that probably sits closer to the Applied Software category that you might find in business school like using spreadsheets, basic command lines, intro to databases or python.

But to your point, how rarely software engineering is being taught is a huge problem. Even if only 30% of degree holders took classes in it, it would be huge in helping spread best practices.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#264

Post by hyperthesis » Fri, Dec 08, 2023, 11:35 PM UTC

t43562 wrote: post #224

The reason I find it easier to work with people who have a degree in Computer Science is that I don't have to convince them of the need for good algorithms and not to try to implement parsers or cryptography by hand. When it comes to software engineering I feel there is no qualification where you can feel that the gross naivety about quality and working in teams (and with other teams) has been similarly ironed out. I…

Pushback on parsers. It's very difficult to provide useful diagnostic error messages with yacc/bison. So most languages end up with a hand-written recursive descent parser.

The only exception I personally know of is jq (uses bison). So it's difficult to produce helpful syntax error messages in the implementation of jq.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#265

Post by BoiledCabbage » Fri, Dec 08, 2023, 11:37 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #163

Gare wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Formal proof of what ? That it has no bugs? Ha! You can formally prove that it doesn't have certain kinds of bugs. And that's good! But it also is an enormous amount of work. And so, even for life-critical software, the vast majority is not formally proven, because we want more software than we can afford to formally prove.

Exactly, it's fundamentally impossible. Formal proofs can help with parts of the process, but it can guarantee no bugs in the product. These are the steps of software, and their transitions. It's fundamentally a game of telephone with errors at each step along the way.

What actually would solve the customer's problem -> What the customer thinks they want -> What they communicate that they want -> What the requirements collector hears -> What the requirements collector documents -> How the implementor interprets the requirements -> What the implementor designs/plans -> What the implementor implements.

Formal proofs can help with the last 3 steps. But again that's assuming the implementor can formalize every requirement they interpreted. And that's impossible as well, there will always be implicit assumptions about the running environment, performance, scale, the behavior of dependent processes/APIs.

It helps with a small set of possible problems. If those problems are mission-critical then absolutely tackle them, but there will never be a situation where it can help with the first 5 steps of the problem, or with the implicit items in the 6th step above.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#266

Post by johnnyanmac » Fri, Dec 08, 2023, 11:39 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #192

duped wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

What society needs is the second order effect though. I don't care about education for the sake of education, I can for what education can do for me/society. Now some of what most institutions define as a good education is good for society (the ability to think is very useful), but I don't value/support education because of arbitrary definitions that an institution might come up with. I value/support education becaus…

>When institutions allow student to take degrees that society finds less valuable (art,music...) they are doing society a disservice by not producing what society needs.

1. what's wrong with a student pursuing their own personal goals? A person doesn't need to produce for society's sake.

2. despite that sentiment you hold, it's clear many people do value art and music. Maybe not in its pure form, but those artists do in fact fuel industries worth billions. Clearly "society" values something that requires such skills and thinking.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#267

Post by ricw » Fri, Dec 08, 2023, 11:40 PM UTC

hardwaregeek wrote: post #160

titzer wrote: post #117

We do teach these things, they are just not core CS topics, but rather in other areas, relegated to electives like a software engineering course. At CMU we have entire Master's program for software engineering and an entire PhD program (in my department). We teach exactly the kinds of things the blog post is about, and more. Software Engineering is a whole field, a whole discipline. I get that this is a blog post and…

There's a massive gap between taught at CMU and taught at most universities. And even if it is taught, it's usually outdated or focused on very literal stuff like how to write web applications. I'd have killed for a class that actually focuses on implementation, on teamwork, on building complicated systems.

That was a dedicated software engineering course I took at university. Teams of 5. Had to put the soft eng theory into practice. And if’s not CMU.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#268

Post by d0gsg0w00f » Fri, Dec 08, 2023, 11:41 PM UTC

FalconSensei wrote: post #23

KeplerBoy wrote: post #18

> It will be necessary to deliver software without bugs in time. Seems like a pretty bad premise to start an article on quality software. If you believe you can ship bug free code, it's time to switch careers.

> If you believe you can ship bug free code, it's time to switch careers. Unfortunately, you are correct. Shipping in time and bug free are inversely proportional, and in a world were usually it's hard to argue with PMs for more time to have better testing, or paying tech debt... it's just a reality

Like the age old builder trope.

"Cheap. Fast. Good. Pick two."

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#269

Post by Verdex » Fri, Dec 08, 2023, 11:44 PM UTC

kevindamm wrote: post #260

Verdex wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's important to get attribution correct. Really? Says who? Or perhaps you'll prove it from first principles. Although if turns out to be difficult, that's okay. Somebody mentioned something about systems being either complete or consistent but never both. Some things can be true but not proveably so. Can't quite remember who it was though.

Fair enough, I was being annoyingly pedantic. [I believe that] it's important to get attribution correct.

To be fair, annoyingly pedantic is the best kind of pedantic.

- Futurama (kind of)

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#270

Post by mushufasa » Fri, Dec 08, 2023, 11:44 PM UTC

I've found people with a computational physics background have a much better approach to QA. In that field "sense checking" calculation output is a part of the core methodology.