Excuse me, I was taught how to build quality software, but I can't do it because the MBAs who run the company haven't been taught how to build quality software, and the board of directors who hired upper management were not taught how to write quality software. Most places I have worked the opinions of software developers were thoroughly ignored at best.
You are never taught how to build quality software
351–360 of 500 posts
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do they funnel soon to be grads into stressful zoom calls where product managers handwave an entire legacy stack still somehow running on coldfusion and want a rebrand with 'AI' starting Jan 1??
No, but our professor assigned teams at random, gave us a buggy spec, and then changed the spec with one week to go during finals week. (This last part appears to have planned; they did it every year.) This was a surprisingly effective course, if sadistic.
It certainly trains the programmer to not box themselves in with assumptions. What's one more for loop?
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#353We 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…
100% this. My master program was for software engineering not CS. 15 years ago in Ukraine.
We have that. Maybe not enough. But it's definitely not a new thing.
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#354you can't teach software engineering before you have taught people programming. this suggests that programming should be a first requirement for a BS degree and "software engineering" should be MS and onwards.
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#355Earlier 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.
A large number of CS programs are already glorified Java training courses.
Exactly what I see. I know a few cases of CTOs influencing the curriculum of CS courses, pushing it to be more “market ready”. Which was effectively turning it into a 4 year bootcamp.
Which is a big shame, because it’s very common to see developers who would have benefited from a proper CS curriculum, and have to learn it later in life.
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#356We 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…
If my friends hadn’t had such vividly bad experiences with the compiler class, I might not have taken the distributed computing class that was one of the other options to fulfill that category. It’s not the most defining class of my undergrad years, but it was pretty damned close. The fact that most people designing systems don’t know this material inspires a mix of anger and existential dread.
[deleted]
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#357We 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…
How many CS or CE grads from CMU are actually exposed to all of these topics?
Surely, "it is taught", but to whom and how widely?
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
For years a friend tried to get his department (where he worked as a lecturer) to add a software engineering course where the basic syllabus was to (1) receive a TOI from the last semester and the code base, (2) implement some new features in the code base, (3) deploy and operate the code for awhile, and (4) produce a TOI for the next semester. The code base was for a simple service that basically provided virus/malw…
In my university, (US, state school,) we had a software engineering course exactly like this. It was great in theory, but in practice, the experience was rushed, the codebase was poor quality, (layers upon layers of nothing features with varying code quality,) and the background knowledge was completely ignored. The application we had to work on was a Tomcat Java Web application with an Angular frontend, when neither…
I think like your example where things go wrong is the most realistic exposure to programming you can give someone.
Learning why things are bad, and why it's bad to experience them offers a new level of appreciation or better ways to argue why certain things should be done.
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've wished that students would be required to hand their semester long project to the person next to them each week.
Almost every CS course I took went the other way and had strict cheating policies that essentially made any group work verboten. There was 1 group project in 1 course I took in 4 years. My spouse on the other hand took an explicitly IT program and they had group projects, engaging with real world users, building real solutions, etc.
> strict cheating policies that essentially made any group work verboten
If I had to guess, some polytechnic school or another?
With some classes even forbidding discussing work with other students, where each assignment required a signed (digitally or otherwise) affidavit listing everyone you consulted, acknowledging that if you actually listed anyone, you were admitting to violating the academic honesty policies and if you didn't list anyone yet had spoken with others you were of course also violating the academic honesty policies.
Where only consulting the professors or TAs was allowed, the TAs were never around, and the professors refused to help because if they gave you any hints, it would apparently give away the answer, which would be unfair to the other students.
Re: You are never taught how to build quality software
#360We 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…
It seems to vary a lot from school to school. At my university (2010-2014) we were writing unit tests from the first CS class. I can't say we got much instruction on how to structure more complex applications in order to make them testable, however. Things like dependency injection and non-trivial mocking have to be learned on the job, which is a real shame. Even within the industry skills and approaches to designing code for tests feel very heterogeneous.