What the hell? Yes it is taught. How it is interpreted afterwards is very dependant on the team or community you surround yourself with. You get all the tools from schooling, how we use them is entirely up to us.
You are never taught how to build quality software
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Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#272What the hell? Yes it is taught. How it is interpreted afterwards is very dependant on the team or community you surround yourself with. You get all the tools from schooling, how we use them is entirely up to us.
Obviously the entire article is an opinion piece and flame bait and I fell for it.
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. I have a Master's in Software Engineering and the way to change things is for those with the formal education to try and spread good practices as much as possible in the workplace. Sometimes the main benefit is just knowing that good practices exist so you can seek them out. The biggest impact I've had at the places I've worked have been about procedures and methodology, not how to use UML or draw a dataf…
What I'm saying is that if your goal is to introduce more engineering rigor and your plan is for for the tiny percentage of graduate school graduates to percolate these ideas through the industry, it's probably a bad plan and likely to fail. This was a thread about why software developers don't do engineering like other disciplines. One partial answer is that those other disciplines take it much more seriously at the…
> Probably the more compelling answer is that the industry doesn't' really want them to for the most part.
This is it. Everyone is making money hand over fist despite not doing it. You might want it, but you don't need it.
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#274We 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…
What does research in this field look like?
So I have not done research any software engineering field and have not read all that much either. One example that comes to mind from one of my courses that I took in software engineering is research around mutation-based testing. That form of testing is where you generate random variants of your test by doing things like deleting a statement, adding a statement, changing a less than sign to a greater than sign, etc. Then you check to see that at least one of your tests fails for each variant. If it does not, you either add a test or mark that variant as being effectively the same program. I forget what the term is for it. At any rate, I think there is still research being done on this topic, for example how to effectively generate programs that do not generate as many functionally identical programs. Software testing in general is a big part of software engineering, and I think there is still a fair amount of research that could be done about it.
In my opinion, the intersection of cognitive psychology and software engineering is also ripe for a lot of research. I feel like we as software engineers have a lot of intuitions about how to be productive, but I would love to see various things that could indicate productivity measured in a controlled lab setting.
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
A saying that I once heard and appreciate goes like this: "A programmer who releases buggy software and fixes them is better than a programmer who always releases perfect software in one shot, because the latter doesn't know how to fix bugs." Perhaps similar to the saying that a good driver will miss a turn, but a bad driver never misses one.
That's backward. A successful software development methodology will tend to catch bugs early in the development pipeline. The doesn't know how to fix bugs idea seems pretty silly.
I think you misunderstand, I'm talking about a programmer who makes perfect, bug-free code in one shot. There are no bugs to catch and fix, because this "perfect" programmer never writes buggy code.
The moral of the sayings is, that "perfect" programmer is actually a bad programmer because he wouldn't know how to fix bugs by virtue of never needing to deal with them.
To reuse the driver analogy, the driver who never misses a turn is a bad driver because he doesn't know what to do when he does miss a turn.
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#276We 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.
I've wished that students would be required to hand their semester long project to the person next to them each week.
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, engi…
I don't really think that software engineering is a trade per se. I think it is a much more creative activity that requires a lot more baseline knowledge. I think an automotive engineer is to a mechanic as a software engineer is to an IT administrator. There is still a fair amount of creativity and knowledge required for being a mechanic or IT admin, but I don't think it's nearly the same amount.
Software engineering is interesting, though, because it does not require as much formal education as many other engineering fields to get a job. I think this is in part because it is very economically valuable (in the US at least) and because the only tool you need is a computer with an Internet connection.
With all of that said, I think SWE is probably closer to a trade than other engineering disciplines, but not by all that much.
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#278The competitive CS schools where many of the students needed good sample code projects have an innate sense of building quality software. Usually because they know it'll be showcased, but also because they haven't gotten lazy with shortcuts or been overly managed to spend time developing instead of fixing. I thought it was funny the article referenced the famous umbrella monster. Here is the longer clip: https://coub.com/view/284lib
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#279From the article -- At some point, I realized that I wasn't using the right arguments either. Explaining that the software will be 'more stable' or 'make maintenance much easier' is not palpable for someone who doesn't work in the codebase themselves. We need to speak about money. As developers, we need to speak about the cost of not doing QA. This is the language of business and managers in general. The more general…
I've found the only true way out of this hellish situation is to work at a place mature enough for the leadership to already understand all this.
If you have to explain why quality matters, they're at least as ignorant as you if not more. They deserve their fate. The upshot is you'll probably also get paid way better and more quickly develop a better sense of how business is supposed to be done at a mature company.
Of course you also have to deliver on your promises that all the time you're spending will improve things and isn't just some amateur quixotic itch.
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#280We 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…
I chose software engineering. 3 years into the program the head of the department made a speech at an event to the effect of "Software hasn't changed in the last 10 years". It instantly devalued the entire program for me.