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Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

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Re: Is something bugging you?

#111

Post by Aachen »

adamauckland wrote: post #101
benrutter wrote: post #98

This is a great pitch, and I don't want to come across as negative, but I feel like a statement like "we found all bugs" can only be true with a very narrow definition of bug. The most pernicious, hard-to-find bugs that I've come across have all been around the business logic of an application, rather than it hitting into an error state. I'm thinking of the category where you have something like "a database is curren…

I consider a "bug" to be "it was supposed to do something and failed". Issues around business logic are not failures of the system, the system worked to spec, the spec was not comprehensive enough and now we iterate.

What do you call it when the spec is wrong? Like clearly actually wrong, such as when someone copied a paragraph from one CRUD-describing page to the next and forgot to change the word "thing1" to "thing2" in the delete description.

Because I'd call that a bug. A spec bug, but a bug. It's no feature request to make the code based on the newer page delete thing2 rather than thing1, it's fixing a defect

Re: Is something bugging you?

#112

Post by voidmain »

amw-zero wrote: post #75
wilkystyle wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it even need to be containerized? According to the post, it sounds like Antithesis is a solution at the hypervisor layer.

Yes it looks like containerization is required: https://antithesis.com/docs/getting_started/setup.html#conta...

Containers are doing two jobs for us: they give our customers a convenient way to send us software to run, and they give us a convenient place to simulate the network boundary between different machines in a distributed system. The whole guest operating system running the containers is also running inside the deterministic hypervisor and under test (and it's mostly just NixOS Linux, not something weird that we wrote).

I'm a co-founder of Antithesis.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#113

Post by didgetmaster »

jimbokun wrote: post #35

> The biggest effect was that it gave our tiny engineering team the productivity of a team 50x its size. I feel like the idea of the legendary "10x" developer has been bastardized to just mean workers who work 15 hours a day 6.5 days a week to get something out the door until they burn out. But here's your real 10x (or 50x) productivity. People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to…

It seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does. Too often, management will focus more on the guy who works 12 hour days to accomplish 8 hours of real work than the guy who gets the same thing accomplished in an 8 hour day. Also, deviations from 'normal' are frowned upon. Taking time to improve the process isn't built into the schedule; so taking time to build a wheelbarrow is discouraged when they think you could be hauling buckets faster instead.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#114

Post by throwitaway222 »

jimbokun wrote: post #35

> The biggest effect was that it gave our tiny engineering team the productivity of a team 50x its size. I feel like the idea of the legendary "10x" developer has been bastardized to just mean workers who work 15 hours a day 6.5 days a week to get something out the door until they burn out. But here's your real 10x (or 50x) productivity. People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to…

No one reading this during the hours of 9-5 is a 10x.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#115

Post by rkangel »

adamauckland wrote: post #101
benrutter wrote: post #98

This is a great pitch, and I don't want to come across as negative, but I feel like a statement like "we found all bugs" can only be true with a very narrow definition of bug. The most pernicious, hard-to-find bugs that I've come across have all been around the business logic of an application, rather than it hitting into an error state. I'm thinking of the category where you have something like "a database is curren…

I consider a "bug" to be "it was supposed to do something and failed". Issues around business logic are not failures of the system, the system worked to spec, the spec was not comprehensive enough and now we iterate.

Systems Engineering has terminology for this distinction.

Verification is "does this thing do what I asked it to do".

Validation is "did I ask it to do the right thing".

Re: Is something bugging you?

#116

Post by Aachen »

moritonal wrote: post #100
benrutter wrote: post #98

This is a great pitch, and I don't want to come across as negative, but I feel like a statement like "we found all bugs" can only be true with a very narrow definition of bug. The most pernicious, hard-to-find bugs that I've come across have all been around the business logic of an application, rather than it hitting into an error state. I'm thinking of the category where you have something like "a database is curren…

Good summary of the hard part of being a software developer that deals with clients.

What software developer does not deal with clients (and makes a living)?

Re: Is something bugging you?

#117

Post by wruza »

dkyc wrote: post #85

On mobile, the "Let's talk" button in the top right corner is cut off by the carousel menu overlay. Seems like CSS is still out of scope of the bug fixing magic for now. On a more serious note, it's an interesting blog post, but it comes off as veeery confident about what is clearly an incredibly broad and complex topic. Curious to see how it will work in production.

Yeah, if only there was some scientific way to ensure that elements don't overlap, let's call it "constraints" maybe, so one could test layouts by simply solving, idk... something like a set of linear equations? Hope some day CSS will stop being "aweso"me and become nothing in favor of a useful layout system.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#119

Post by amw-zero »

Communitivity wrote: post #106

There are situations where no bugs is an important requirement, if it means no bugs that cause a noticeable failure. Things such as planes, submarines, nuclear reactors. For those there is provably correct code. That takes a long time to write, and I mean a really long time. Applying that to all software doesn't make sense from a commercial perspective. There are areas where improvements can have a big impact though,…

This is a false dichotomy though. The proposed approach here has a (theoretically) great cost to value ratio. Spending time on a workload generation process, and adding some asserts to your code is much lower cost than hand-writing tens of thousands of test cases.

So it's not that this approach is only useful for critical applications, it's that it's low-cost enough to potentially speed up "regular" business application testing.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#120

Post by randomdata »

throwitaway222 wrote: post #114
jimbokun wrote: post #35

> The biggest effect was that it gave our tiny engineering team the productivity of a team 50x its size. I feel like the idea of the legendary "10x" developer has been bastardized to just mean workers who work 15 hours a day 6.5 days a week to get something out the door until they burn out. But here's your real 10x (or 50x) productivity. People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to…

No one reading this during the hours of 9-5 is a 10x.

Or is. If a 1x puts in an 8 hour day, a 10x only has to put in a 48 minute day. That leaves plenty of time to read this.
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