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You are never taught how to build quality software

florianbellmann.com

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Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#151

Post by darth_aardvark »

Unrelated to the article, I could immediately identify the image used as definitely AI-generated. But I can't identify any reason why. It's a normal picture of a stone brick wall. Yet I'm 100% sure it's AI.

No shame to the author for their choice; replacing stock images with generated ones is a great use case. It's spooky to me that we've been so quickly trained to identify this subconsciously.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#152

Post by bakul »

titzer wrote: post #117

We do teach these things, they are just not core CS topics, but rather in other areas, relegated to electives like a software engineering course. At CMU we have entire Master's program for software engineering and an entire PhD program (in my department). We teach exactly the kinds of things the blog post is about, and more. Software Engineering is a whole field, a whole discipline. I get that this is a blog post and…

Do SE classes teach debugging skills? I hope they do. So many times I have seen people try random things rather than follow a systematic approach.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#153

Post by roenxi »

Gare wrote: post #108
codegeek wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. If you have written production grade software at real companies, you know that the moment you make that new commit (even if 1 liner change), you are now ready to accept that it could break something. yes you can do your unit tests, integration test, User Acceptance Tests and what not. But every code change = new possible bug that you may not be able to catch until it occurs to a customer. Whenever I hear a devel…

How about a formal proof? :) I jest, but that should be the gold standard for anything life-critical and good to have for mission-critical software. Alas, we're not there yet.

As always, the branding of formal methods sucks. As other commentators point out, it isn't technically possible to provide a formal proof that software is correct. And that is fine, because formal software methods don't do that.

But right from the outset the approach is doomed to fail because its proponents write like they don't know what they are talking about and think they can write bug-free software.

It really should be "write software with a formal spec". Once people start talking about "proof" in practice it sounds dishonest. It isn't possible to prove software and the focus really needs to be on the spec.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#154

Post by sam0x17 »

titzer wrote: post #117

We do teach these things, they are just not core CS topics, but rather in other areas, relegated to electives like a software engineering course. At CMU we have entire Master's program for software engineering and an entire PhD program (in my department). We teach exactly the kinds of things the blog post is about, and more. Software Engineering is a whole field, a whole discipline. I get that this is a blog post and…

Worth mentioning that SE isn't even a thing for the most part at non STEM-specific schools and/or outside very large colleges/universities

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#155

Post by topaz0 »

akhosravian wrote: post #137
Gare wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a formal proof? :) I jest, but that should be the gold standard for anything life-critical and good to have for mission-critical software. Alas, we're not there yet.

I’m not a CS academic or a mathematician, but don’t Godel’s incompleteness theorems preclude a formal proof of correctness?

No. There are plenty of things that can be proved, it's just that there exist true statements that cannot be proved.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#156

Post by Veserv »

akhosravian wrote: post #137
Gare wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a formal proof? :) I jest, but that should be the gold standard for anything life-critical and good to have for mission-critical software. Alas, we're not there yet.

I’m not a CS academic or a mathematician, but don’t Godel’s incompleteness theorems preclude a formal proof of correctness?

No. It merely prevents you from confirming every arbitrarily complex proof. Incompleteness is more like: I give you a convoluted mess of spaghetti code and claim it computes prime numbers and I demand you try to prove me wrong.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#157

Post by crysin »

__loam wrote: post #149
titzer wrote: post #117

We do teach these things, they are just not core CS topics, but rather in other areas, relegated to electives like a software engineering course. At CMU we have entire Master's program for software engineering and an entire PhD program (in my department). We teach exactly the kinds of things the blog post is about, and more. Software Engineering is a whole field, a whole discipline. I get that this is a blog post and…

I took one of these kinds of classes in my masters program this year. They were totally obsessed with UML. It would be nice if these classes could move beyond dogma that is decades old.

Got my MS in SE at DePaul University in Chicago. Wrote more UMLs for those classes than I’ve done in 10 years of actual software development.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#158

Post by rockemsockem »

datadeft wrote: post #90
KeplerBoy wrote: post #18

> It will be necessary to deliver software without bugs in time. Seems like a pretty bad premise to start an article on quality software. If you believe you can ship bug free code, it's time to switch careers.

Spicy take on engineering. Why do we accept this for software when do not accept the same in other engineering domains?

We accept this in all fields of engineering. Everything is "good enough" and the seems to work reasonably well. You should remember this next time you hear about car recalls, maintenance work on bridges, or when some component in your laptop flakes out.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#159

Post by AnimalMuppet »

titzer wrote: post #117

We do teach these things, they are just not core CS topics, but rather in other areas, relegated to electives like a software engineering course. At CMU we have entire Master's program for software engineering and an entire PhD program (in my department). We teach exactly the kinds of things the blog post is about, and more. Software Engineering is a whole field, a whole discipline. I get that this is a blog post and…

Here's the thing, though: Of a CS graduating class, 90% of them will work as software engineers, not as computer scientists. (All numbers made up, but I think they're about right.)

We don't need these things to be electives. We don't need them to be a master's program. We need an undergraduate software engineering program, and we need 90% of the people in CS to switch to that program instead.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#160

Post by hardwaregeek »

titzer wrote: post #117

We do teach these things, they are just not core CS topics, but rather in other areas, relegated to electives like a software engineering course. At CMU we have entire Master's program for software engineering and an entire PhD program (in my department). We teach exactly the kinds of things the blog post is about, and more. Software Engineering is a whole field, a whole discipline. I get that this is a blog post and…

There's a massive gap between taught at CMU and taught at most universities. And even if it is taught, it's usually outdated or focused on very literal stuff like how to write web applications. I'd have killed for a class that actually focuses on implementation, on teamwork, on building complicated systems.
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