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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

#111

Post by throwvjugju »

tsimionescu wrote: post #47
swesour wrote: post #28

Earlier 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…

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…

Jai has array bounds checking.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#112

Post by ozim »

esafak wrote: post #110
ozim wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's testable it's trivial to write tests for! You don't want the next person to introduce a bug, do you?

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”.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#113

Post by sigwinch »

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.

That’s how I do it. 100% test coverage doesn’t make bug reports irrelevant. Every test should have a reason.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#114

Post by Barrin92 »

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…

>Quality is a measurement

No it isn't, as in it literally isn't. Quantification is the process of judging something numerically, objectively and in measurement. Qualification is just the opposite, judging something by its nature, essence or kind.

Software quality, like all kinds of quality, is always a subjective and experiential feature. Just like, when someone says, this piece of furniture is a high quality, handmade chair, in all likelihood they haven't performed a numerical analysis of the properties of the chair, they're expressing a subjective, direct sentiment.

The handmade movement in software, was exactly about this, putting focus on the personal, lived judgement of experienced practitioners as opposed to trying to quantify software by some objective metric, that's why individual people feature so heavily in it.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#115

Post by esafak »

ozim wrote: post #112
esafak wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's testable it's trivial to write tests for! You don't want the next person to introduce a bug, do you?

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!

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#116

Post by cushychicken »

Barrin92 wrote: post #114
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…

>Quality is a measurement No it isn't, as in it literally isn't. Quantification is the process of judging something numerically, objectively and in measurement. Qualification is just the opposite, judging something by its nature, essence or kind. Software quality, like all kinds of quality, is always a subjective and experiential feature. Just like, when someone says, this piece of furniture is a high quality, handma…

> 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.

That’s what I’m trying to tell you and everyone else reading this.

Software, as a profession, collectively talks about quality with all of the rigor of joint passing English majors sharing their favorite sections of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Quality has a meaning and a definition and a field of study attached to it. Semiconductors and large scale consumer product manufacturing wouldn’t exist as we know it without this.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#117

Post by Barrin92 »

cushychicken wrote: post #116
Barrin92 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Quality is a measurement No it isn't, as in it literally isn't. Quantification is the process of judging something numerically, objectively and in measurement. Qualification is just the opposite, judging something by its nature, essence or kind. Software quality, like all kinds of quality, is always a subjective and experiential feature. Just like, when someone says, this piece of furniture is a high quality, handma…

> 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 terms appropriately. We can objectively talk about the quantities attached to a software. Number of dependencies, size, startup time, what have you, but two people will never necessarily agree on the quality of software, your high quality software might be junk to me, because that is at its root a subjective judgement. There is not a lot of qualitative or subjective judgement in the world of elementary hardware (it either works or doesn't), there is a lot of it in end user software.

It is very difficult to make a bad piece of hardware that does very well on a number of metrics, it's very easy to make a shoddy piece of software that performs well on an infinite number of metrics, because nobody has a subjective experience with a transistor but they do with a piece of software. That is why you should use the terms correctly and not apply processes from one domain to the other.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#118

Post by hinkley »

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.

One of my managers was fond of the phrase, “a project is done when nobody is willing to work on it anymore.” That can be because of a number of reasons, including that the money is gone, or it sucks your will to live.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#119

Post by reactordev »

ktallett wrote: post #8
reactordev wrote: post #3

Curious how they’ll balance the business needs of moving fast with AI vs quality because my agents aren’t that good. While it works, I’m often having to cleanup afterwards - slowing everything down. I was almost as fast when I had just basic intellisense. Anyway, I’ll watch the twitch stream from across the pond.

There are plenty of alternative software needs that do not need to be AI based nor do they need to change tactics due to the current obsession with AI.

If you know of any that are in need of an engineer, let me know. Every single executive I’ve talked to in the last 4 years is all “How can I use AI with this?”

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#120

Post by supportengineer »

tsimionescu wrote: post #48
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 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 no…

Everyone was in the same Bay Area office building and both teams talked to each other and ate lunch together and sat together
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