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A software conference that advocates for quality

bettersoftwareconference.com

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Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#121

Post by supportengineer »

djaychela wrote: post #43
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…

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!

The software was rock solid. There were very few surprises once deployed.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#122

Post by astrobe_ »

rizzom5000 wrote: post #107
wiseowise wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Until you start clearing the mines your velocity continues to drop. I've been doing this for decades, it's never a problem. Either velocity tanks in which case there's a short period where company invests into improving it, or people leave.

I've seen projects that failed, or were killed, likely at least in part due to a culture that encouraged poor quality and tech debt. This is preventable, and for no additional up-front engineering effort or time investment.

Yes, parent says "people leave" as if it is not a problem in itself; you lose the time it takes to train these people, and they probably take some knowledge about the products with them. Or maybe we are actually talking about commodity developers?

But I'm curious about how one prevents this dysfunctional culture.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#123

Post by capyba »

ozim wrote: post #73
zoover2020 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can write modular code without writing tests - I write testable code - I don't write tests. When I need I can always add them back, but I tend to skip it as mostly it doesn't make sense. But still cottage industry of "clean code" is pushing me into self doubts and shame.

I’m a mechanical engineer, not a software person, but I write a lot of (hopefully close to professional quality) code for my work. writing tests while in the beginning/middle of my development cycle has been the best change I’ve made in how I do things in quite a long time. Since I’m a self-taught amateur often working solo, its invaluable for helping me gain confidence that everything I’m doing is working correctly as I learn the language/libraries necessary for me to build each new program.

I’m not saying that you yourself have this attitude - but the “tests are for suckers, I just ship” crowd really grinds my gears because to me it says “ha! Why do you care about getting things right?”

Totally get where you’re coming from though, sometimes the expected behavior is trivial to verify or (in the case of GUIs) can be very difficult and not worth the effort to implement.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#124

Post by hinkley »

astrobe_ wrote: post #122
rizzom5000 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen projects that failed, or were killed, likely at least in part due to a culture that encouraged poor quality and tech debt. This is preventable, and for no additional up-front engineering effort or time investment.

Yes, parent says "people leave" as if it is not a problem in itself; you lose the time it takes to train these people, and they probably take some knowledge about the products with them. Or maybe we are actually talking about commodity developers? But I'm curious about how one prevents this dysfunctional culture.

At my last job the people motivated to fix the clusterfuck were the first to leave. Except me because I’m a masochist apparently.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#125

Post by switchbak »

rizzom5000 wrote: post #107
wiseowise wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Until you start clearing the mines your velocity continues to drop. I've been doing this for decades, it's never a problem. Either velocity tanks in which case there's a short period where company invests into improving it, or people leave.

I've seen projects that failed, or were killed, likely at least in part due to a culture that encouraged poor quality and tech debt. This is preventable, and for no additional up-front engineering effort or time investment.

I think this is the most common failure mode I’ve seen, short of a failure to find a proper product-market fit.

It’s just really hard to overstate how much damage a bunch of crappy code can have. Even with the best of intentions. I must say I strongly disagree that this is “never a problem”.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#126

Post by marcosdumay »

pydry wrote: post #77
rachofsunshine wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't happen because building the best software is not the goal of a software engineering job. If you want to do that on your own time, that's fine - but the purpose of a job is economic. Of course you should write software of some reasonable quality, but optimizations have diminishing economic returns. Eventually, the returns are lower than the cost (in time, money, etc) of further optimizing, and this break-ev…

This is only true in certain contexts. Most of the time software quality is looked over not because it genuinely isnt important but simply because it's hard to perceive. Ive watched many businesses appreciate the benefits of software quality (happy customers, few incidents, fast feature turnaround) without ascribing it to anything in particular. Then, when it went away, they chalked up the problems to something else,…

> E.g. they think "another developer will fix it"

Ouch. It seems that when a manager sinks some team's velocity by adding a bad developer to it the following reaction is always to add more bad developers so the velocity recovers.

And then when they can't herd all the bad developers around, the obvious next step is to finish destroying everything again by imposing some strict process.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#127

Post by marcosdumay »

pydry wrote: post #83
userbinator wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ive noticed that some of these types tend to be well meaning young people (often girls) who are super excited to have scored a job doing developer outreach for $BIGTECH. It's a clever political tactic coz a 50 year old white male middle manager at Microsoft trying to become a board member on an open source foundation would face a lot more hostility than a 20-something girl who pushes all of the diversity buttons. It…

> Who wants to be that person?

Yep, preemptively destroying the reputation of whoever opposes you is a common and ancient tactic of bullies from all levels, from school patios to fascist governments.

Look at the people who are pushing for politicizing software development, and you'll see they are always getting money out of the deal.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#128

Post by cushychicken »

Barrin92 wrote: post #117
cushychicken wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No it isn't, as in it literally isn't. Yes, it is. It is a well known field in hardware development, and generally treated as a sub field of manufacturing engineering. It deals with things like testing, sampling, statistics of yield, and process improvement. If you’ve ever done a DFMEA, an 8D report, a Five Whys review, a sampling quality analysis, or a process map, you’ve used tools produced by this discipline. Th…

>Quality has a meaning and a definition and a field of study attached to it Yes and I gave you that definition in the first part of my response. That someone in the semiconductor industry made a poor and colloquial choice of words when he confused qualitative and quantitative processes, (the hardware industry deals with the latter), is not evidence to the contrary. When people talk about software, they're using the t…

Yeah, I think we’re just gonna have to agree to disagree here.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#129

Post by ozim »

esafak wrote: post #115
ozim wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read my original post again. We don’t have bugs that all those “do it right way” people claim doing it for 15 years with good track record. You just contribute to BS scare tactics of people selling “clean code”.

How do you know you don't have bugs? Is everything instrumented (observable)? I could just as easily say you're peddling ignorance as bliss!

You can have a lot of other processes and tests on other levels than unit tests ;)
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