For a non-engineer (business) person the case "engineering quality vs move fast break things" sounds more like "slow & expensive VS fast". The choice is obvious.
"How can you not have enough time to do it right, but enough time to do it twice?"
A software conference that advocates for quality
41–50 of 160 posts
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#42I’ve seen one company in my 30 year career with effective quality control.
The QE engineers and the development engineers were in entirely separate branches of the org chart. They had different incentive structures. The interface documentation was the source of truth.
The release cadence was slow. QE had absolute authority to stop a release. QE wrote more code than development engineers did with their tests and test automation.
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#43I’ve seen one company in my 30 year career with effective quality control. The QE engineers and the development engineers were in entirely separate branches of the org chart. They had different incentive structures. The interface documentation was the source of truth. The release cadence was slow. QE had absolute authority to stop a release. QE wrote more code than development engineers did with their tests and test…
Was the end result better or worse for this? I'm not being facetious, I just can't get if you think it was a good idea!
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#44> Where in Sweden is it happening?
> In a charming small town
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#45This thing feels pretty weird to me. I'm guessing it's an attempt at organizing some sort of european Handmade event, and trying to keep it small.
But between the sparse website, invite-only and anonymous organizers, it just feels like it's emphasizing the reactionary vibes around the Handmade/casey/jblow sphere. Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything.
Glad to see they got Sweden's own Eskil Steenberg though. Tuning in for that at least.
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which is not so much concerned that their software might be buggy as that it might be lame This is not at _all_ my interpretation of Casey and JBlow's views. How did you arrive at this conclusion? > They're more concerned about user experience and efficiency than they are about correctness. They're definitely very concerned about efficiency, but user experience? Are you referring to DevX? They definitely don't priz…
> This is not at _all_ my interpretation of Casey and JBlow's views. IMHO this group's canonical lament was expressed by Mike Acton in his "Data-Oriented Design and C++" talk, where he asks: "...Then why does it take Word 2 seconds to start up?!"[0]. See also Muratori's bug reports which seem similar[1]. I think it is important to note, as the parent comment alludes, that these performance problems are real problems,…
> Their argument is more like -- what if all programmers were like John Carmack and Michael Abrash? Instead of recognizing software is an economic activity and certain marginal performance gains are often left on the table, because most programmers can't be John Carmack and Michael Abrash all the time.
At least for Casey his case is less that everyone should be Carmack or Abrash but that programmers often through their poor design choices prematurely pessimise their code when they don’t need too.
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#47I may be the only one who thought this, but this doesn't seem to be related to the fondly remembered Better Software Magazine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Software_Magazine It seems to be socially associated with the Handmade Hero and Jon Blow Jai crowd, which is not so much concerned that their software might be buggy as that it might be lame . They're more concerned about user experience and efficiency tha…
> which is not so much concerned that their software might be buggy as that it might be lame This is not at _all_ my interpretation of Casey and JBlow's views. How did you arrive at this conclusion? > They're more concerned about user experience and efficiency than they are about correctness. They're definitely very concerned about efficiency, but user experience? Are you referring to DevX? They definitely don't priz…
From what I've seen, they are very much in a game developer mindset: you want to make a finished product for a specific use, you want that product to be very well received for your users, and you want it to run really fast on their hardware. When you're done with it, your next product will likely be 80% new code, so long term maintainabity is not a major concern.
And stability is important, but not critical - and the main way they want to achieve it is that errors should be very obvious so that they can be caught easily in manual testing. So C++ style UB is not great, since you may not always catch it, but crashing on reading a null pointer is great, since you'll easily see it during testing. Also, performance concerns trump correctness - paying a performance cost to get some safety (e.g. using array bounds access enforcement) is lazy design, why would you write out of bounds accesses in the first place?
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#48I’ve seen one company in my 30 year career with effective quality control. The QE engineers and the development engineers were in entirely separate branches of the org chart. They had different incentive structures. The interface documentation was the source of truth. The release cadence was slow. QE had absolute authority to stop a release. QE wrote more code than development engineers did with their tests and test…
The company I work for used to be organized like this a decade or so ago, and people who were around back then still tell horror stories that we all laugh about. Things like bug targets not being met leading to extreme bug ping-pong ("you didn't specify the phase of the moon when this crash on clicking Run reproduced, Needs Information", "this GUI control is misaligned, here are 5 bugs, one for each button that is not where it should be", endless hostile discussions on the severity of bugs and so on).
Sofwtare development and quality assurance should be tightly integrated and should work together on ensuring a good product. Passing builds over a wall of documentation is a recipe for disasters, not good quality software.
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#49> A software conference that advocates for quality I am going to keep saying this, if your main tagline/ethos is broken by your website you have failed. * On mobile the topics are hidden without scroll over. You also can't read multiple of the topics without scrolling right as you read. * The background is very distracting and disrupts readability. * None of your speakers have links to their socials/what they are kno…
It bothers me that this is from Sweden, a most inclusive country, while being pretentiously exclusive. I live in Sweden and wouldn’t mind going to a small conference on my holidays, but unfortunately I can’t find the “charming town” where this is supposedly taking place nor know how to find Sam, Sander and Charlie.
Re: A software conference that advocates for quality
#50This thing feels pretty weird to me. I'm guessing it's an attempt at organizing some sort of european Handmade event, and trying to keep it small. But between the sparse website, invite-only and anonymous organizers, it just feels like it's emphasizing the reactionary vibes around the Handmade/casey/jblow sphere. Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything. Glad to…
That's pretty much what it is, it's a reaction to an implosion that happened last year in the Handmade Network related to the Handmade Seattle conference which caused the conference organizer and the community leads to go separate ways.
https://handmade.network/blog/p/8989-separating_from_handmad...
https://handmadecities.com/news/splitting-from-handmade-netw...