It is amazing anything works at all. A rant on software development

https://twitter.com/Rich_Harris/status/923392376592392197

by ssd532 • 9 years ago

19 15 9 years ago

giardini• 9 years ago

"If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization."

- Gerald Weinberg

chrisco255• 9 years ago

Unlike houses, software has a very organic nature to it. Requirements are constantly shifting.

EliRivers• 9 years ago

It's certainly true that the best software I ever worked on didn't suffer shifting requirements.

The customer literally never reported a single bug.

Every requirement was fully tested and fully traceable from requirements document to the exact page of the design document that was going to meet it to the exact lines of code that met it to the module level tests that tested that code to the verification test that tested the requirement at a higher level.

The documentation was beautiful; a document that compiled into two other documents, one being the source code and one being an interlaced design and discussion document with source code in it - one could read this document, read the design, see linked requirements documents, see linked test documents, read the explanations and justifications, interspersed with the source code that then implemented that design. Nobody wrote pure code; we wrote interspersed design and discussion and code, which was then reviewed as a whole.

Even though the project ran for a decade, a newcomer could fully understand everything about the code from reading this document. Within a week, a newcomer fully understood, and if they ever saw code they didn't understand, this document would show them what it was trying to achieve, what requirements it was supporting, how it was being tested. It was 100% waterfall, and fantastically high quality. The customer, after suing one of their other contracted suppliers for failure to deliver working software over a period of years, then came to us to ask if we could make that software too. The high-quality of the work meant that we actually spent less; once designs were approved following review, they were very rarely revisited or changed. Once code was written that met that design, it very rarely needed reworking. Large pieces of the software were written once, correctly, and five years later were still working, exactly as they had been written. When you know what you're supposed to be making in advance, the level of quality you can reach and the low cost of doing it can be astounding.

It all relied on a very high quality of customer without shifting requirements. Sad but true; high quality customers are in very short supply.

I frequently find myself saying at my current workplace "If you don't know what you're meant to be making, the odds of getting it right are very slim." It seems incredible that I have to say it, but I do, and we frequently start making things without a clear picture of what it's meant to be. Still, if customers can't decide what they want, they pay the price.

karlmcguire• 9 years ago

This is the second "twitter blog post" I've seen in a week. And by that I mean 10+ consecutive tweets. Talk about bad UX.

ssd5323• 9 years ago

Is there a word for it? If not we will soon need it. There are many such long tweet sequences I have seen, some by journalists. So it's becoming a common thing like web logs -> blogs two decades ago.

gumby• 9 years ago

I thought there was some site that took twitter streams like this and turned them back into text. In the current scheme, where your eye can't simply flow through the text, makes them unreadable and useless to me, so I no longer even try.

askafriend2• 9 years ago

There is a word for it, it's often called a tweetstorm.

lawpoop• 9 years ago

"Tweatrise"? "Twitter" + "treatise".

Just spitballing here.

copperx• 9 years ago

I swore I had read somewhere that Twitter had removed the 140 character limitation.

askafriend2• 9 years ago

They are testing 280 characters but not all accounts have that new ability yet.

sidlls• 9 years ago

Not all software development is like this. In some sectors it's treated as a proper engineering discipline. Circles where javascript, node and logging into Twitter are a thing are where you find this casual indifference to documentation, garbage interfaces, dozens of competing APIs and so forth. The reason is straightforward: in these areas the problems are neither interesting nor that hard, and so developers get bored and invent complexity where it need not exist.

ssd5323• 9 years ago

I have seen the same incomplete and inconsistent documentation for many Google and Microsoft projects including Kubernetes and many cloud based services. And it is not only about their REST APIs but for their SDKs for programming languages/frameworks not limited to Javascript/Node.

hobofan• 9 years ago

Why would it be different for Google or Microsoft projects?

I think sidlls was talking about industries where lives are at stake, like aviation , where things move slowely and follow a strict QA process. There you have formally verified systems and the like, but you also have to make tradeoffs like working with a limited subset of C because that is formally verifiable.

caseymarquis• 9 years ago

I like modern js for frontend work, but this is why I like statically typed languages on the backend for anything critical or complicated. Even if the documentation for a library is out of date or for a different version, IDE autocompletion allows you to figure things out on your own. Not just when type hints were provided, but in every case.

It is amazing anything works at all. A rant on software development

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