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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

#291

Post by titzer »

3abiton wrote: post #255
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…

What does research in this field look like?

Testing, fuzzing, and verification are all pretty hot SE topics now, at least in my department at CMU. All of those have some element of program analysis, both static and dynamic, so there's potentially deep PL stuff, which is core CS. There's aspects to SE that are not just that, of course, which are studying social processes, management styles and practices, software architectures, design patterns, API design, etc.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#292

Post by mschuster91 »

bluGill wrote: post #195
mschuster91 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies like university educated people because they learn deep thinking. No. Companies love hiring higher-ed graduates because it removes a lot of cost and risk for them: - hiring only people with degrees weeds out everyone unable to cope with a high-stress environment, for whatever reason - crucially, also including people who would normally be protected by ADA or its equivalent provisions in Europe. - it weeds…

> and among top-earning job, males still utterly dominate And thus you destroyed you whole point: females dominate universities these days.

Depends on the degree program. In STEM, women are still the minority by far [1], especially in IT.

[1] https://www.stemwomen.com/women-in-stem-percentages-of-women...

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#293

Post by ivix »

eternityforest wrote: post #232

I completely understand university teaching algorithms over real dev stuff. Algorithms are hard, and take serious work, they're basically math. University seems like the idea place to learn A* search or quicksort, I can't imagine figuring that out without a lot of effort and time spent just focusing on that. What I don't understand is why programmers themselves focus on algorithms over stuff like "Vague heuristics to…

I suspect as with most things in education, they focus on small self contained problems because it's easier to teach and easier to grade. These toy problems end up being all students know and therefore are what employers select on.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#294

Post by dncivuxu7 »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #160
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.

[dead]

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#295

Post by quickthrower2 »

t43562 wrote: post #224

The reason I find it easier to work with people who have a degree in Computer Science is that I don't have to convince them of the need for good algorithms and not to try to implement parsers or cryptography by hand. When it comes to software engineering I feel there is no qualification where you can feel that the gross naivety about quality and working in teams (and with other teams) has been similarly ironed out. I…

It is a culture thing. Try to avoid cowboy shops. The thing is the general standard seems higher than 20 years ago. Source control, unit testing and CI/CD are not controversial any more for example.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#296

Post by quickthrower2 »

colinmorelli wrote: post #33
FalconSensei wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you believe you can ship bug free code, it's time to switch careers. Unfortunately, you are correct. Shipping in time and bug free are inversely proportional, and in a world were usually it's hard to argue with PMs for more time to have better testing, or paying tech debt... it's just a reality

An infinite amount of time would not necessarily yield zero bugs. But more importantly, once you've fixed the "show-stopping bugs," putting the software in front of customers is probably the best next step, as even if it's bug-free, that doesn't mean it solves the problem well.

We need to define bug but if bug is anything a customer (internal or external) is not happy with that passes triage and you can’t throw it back in their face. Then zero bugs would be impossible with even infinite time.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#297

Post by maxFlow »

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…

Thanks for sharing, I'm reviewing the curriculum for the program [0] and it looks great.

Do you know if any of these courses has been opened sourced? It would be great to have access to part of the material.

[0]: https://www.ece.cmu.edu/academics/ms-se/index.html.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#298

Post by gmadsen »

3abiton wrote: post #255
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…

What does research in this field look like?

I would assume something like this? https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/79551

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#299

Post by bombcar »

anacrolix wrote: post #284
fudged71 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chose software engineering. 3 years into the program the head of the department made a speech at an event to the effect of "Software hasn't changed in the last 10 years". It instantly devalued the entire program for me.

I have news for you... He's not wrong. The porcelain is different, but the same methodologies and processes are in place. The biggest change recently is distributed (mostly ignored) version control, that's 20 years old, and continuous integration/development (probably also around 20 years old, but only catching on in the last 10-15 years). Computer science has changed more, there are lots of developments in the last…

The biggest change I’ve seen in 20 years is that things like DVCS and actual good tool chains for languages people actually use are available and in use.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#300

Post by RevEng »

I've been a software developer for 15 years. I started at a start-up company with many others who were fairly junior. We knew we had to take QA seriously, but didn't know how to do it. It took many years to come up with standards, tooling, and so on, but it was totally worth it. Everything in this article rings true from my experience.
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