Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A software conference that advocates for quality

bettersoftwareconference.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 160 posts

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#61

Post by zoover2020 »

ozim wrote: post #55
intelVISA wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aye, it never happens but it does sell a lot of books ;) I don't think we'll reach this promised land™ until incentives re-align. Treating software as an assembly line was obviously The Wrong Thing judging by the results - problem is how can we ever move to a model that rewards quality perhaps similar to (book) authors and royalties? Owner-operator SaaS is about as close as you can get but limits you to web and web-a…

Just like all the fitness content. Get couple shredded guys and gals to show off how fit they are so everyone feels guilty they are snacking past 8PM. Sell another batch of “how to do pushups” followed by “how to do pushups vol.2” with “pushup pro this time even better”. Where in the end normal people are not getting paid for getting shredded, they get paid for doing their stuff. I just constantly feel like I am not…

Why would you skip unit tests? Especially in the AI age. You can quickly verify your behavior. Also, by not writing them you're also missing out on opportunities to modularize your code.

Obviously, this assumes you write enterprise grade code. YMMV

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#62

Post by thecupisblue »

supportengineer wrote: post #42

I’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…

I've worked at one of those companies where software quality was paramount.

They did TDD for a long time, they wrote Clean Code™, they organised meetups, sponsored and went to conferences, they paid 8th Light consultants to come teach (this was actually worth it!) and sent people to Agile workshops and certificates.

At first, I was like "wow, I am in heaven".

About a year later, I noticed so much repetition and waste of time in the processes.

Code was at a point where we had a "usecase" that calls a "repository" that fetches a list of "ItemNetworkResponse" which then gets mapped into "Item" using "ItemNetworkResponseToItemMapper" and tests were written for every possible thing and path.

They had enterprise clients, were charging them nicely, paying developers nicely and pocketed extra money due to "safety buffers" added by both engineers, managers and sales people, basically doubling the length of any project for "safety".

The company kept to their "high dev standards" which meant spending way more time, and thus costing way more, than generic cookie-cutter agencies would cost for the same project.

This was great until every client wanted to save money.

The company shut down last year.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#63

Post by GoblinSlayer »

supportengineer wrote: post #42

I’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 interface documentation was the source of truth.

lol, fire business analysts and let tech writers do their job. Sounds like some kind of VC black company.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#64

Post by gjadi »

userbinator wrote: post #41
zx8080 wrote: post #22

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?"

> plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#65

Post by gjadi »

brabel wrote: post #49
jofzar wrote: post #38

> 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.

> Physical attendance will be invite-only. Tickets will not be publicly available. Invitees will receive an attendee guide with further information.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#66

Post by vodou »

cushychicken wrote: post #58

I think I’ve finally figured out just what is that annoys me about the “software quality” crowd. Quality is a measurement . That’s how it works in hardware land, anyway. Product defects - and, crucially, their associated cost to the company - are quantified Quality is not some abstract, feel good concept like “developer experience”. It’s a real, hard number of how much money the company loses to product defects. Almo…

Some thoughts regarding this:

1. It is partly because the typical metrics used for software development in big corporations (e.g., test coverage, cyclomatic complexity, etc) are such a snake oil. They are constantly misused and/or misinterpreted by management and because of that cause developers a lot of frustration.

2. Some developers see their craft as a form of art, or at least an activity for "expressing themselves" in an almost literary way. You can laugh at this, but I think it is a very humane way of thinking. We want to feel a deeper meaning and purpose in what we do. Antirez of redis fame have expressed something like this. [0]

3. Many of these programmers are working with games and graphics and they have a very distinct metric: FPS.

[0] https://blog.brachiosoft.com/en/posts/redis/

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#67

Post by satisfice »

cushychicken wrote: post #58

I think I’ve finally figured out just what is that annoys me about the “software quality” crowd. Quality is a measurement . That’s how it works in hardware land, anyway. Product defects - and, crucially, their associated cost to the company - are quantified Quality is not some abstract, feel good concept like “developer experience”. It’s a real, hard number of how much money the company loses to product defects. Almo…

I notice you have not quantified any aspect of your opinion, here. Which is not surprising, since your opinion is unrelated to facts, science, experience, or wisdom.

Quality is not a "real, hard number" because such a thing would depend entirely on how you collect the data, what you count as data, and how you interpret the data. All of this is brimming with controversy, as you might know if you had read more than zero books about qualitative research, epistemology, the philosophy, history, or practice of science. I say "might" because of course, the number of books one reads is no measure of wisdom. It is one indicator of an interest to learn, though.

It would be nice if you had learned, in your years on Earth, that you can't talk about quality with any seriousness while simultaneously refusing to accept that quality is about people, relationships, and feelings. It's about risks and interpretations of risk.

Now, here is the part where I agree with you: quality is assessed, not measured. But that assessment is based on evidence, and one kind of evidence is stuff that can be usefully measured.

While there is no such thing as a "qualitometer," we should not be automatically opposed to measuring things that may help us and not hurt us.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#69

Post by loktarogar »

userbinator wrote: post #54
kilpikaarna wrote: post #45

This 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…

Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything. There's a reason web developers, and the ecosystem/community around them, are the butt of many jokes. I don't think it's at all surprising that the injection of identity politics into the software industry has had a negative effect on quality.

> I don't think it's at all surprising that the injection of identity politics into the software industry has had a negative effect on quality.

That's a pretty broad claim. This conference could be in response to a perceived negative effect on quality, but claiming that as a fact seems hard to back up to me

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#70

Post by qznc »

ozim wrote: post #55
intelVISA wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aye, it never happens but it does sell a lot of books ;) I don't think we'll reach this promised land™ until incentives re-align. Treating software as an assembly line was obviously The Wrong Thing judging by the results - problem is how can we ever move to a model that rewards quality perhaps similar to (book) authors and royalties? Owner-operator SaaS is about as close as you can get but limits you to web and web-a…

Just like all the fitness content. Get couple shredded guys and gals to show off how fit they are so everyone feels guilty they are snacking past 8PM. Sell another batch of “how to do pushups” followed by “how to do pushups vol.2” with “pushup pro this time even better”. Where in the end normal people are not getting paid for getting shredded, they get paid for doing their stuff. I just constantly feel like I am not…

You could switch into a domain where safety-critical software is developed. Here devs complain about the inverse problem: Why are we required to have 100% test coverage?!

(The answer btw: Because nobody would be able to explain to a jury/judge that 80% or whatever is enough)

Post reply on HN