Regulation of bugs
June 7th, 2020 at 7:31:56 PM permalink
I'm tired of bugs in software especially regulated software. This is my first mention and will not be the last it's a breadcrumb to what shall be in the future.
DRich
Quote: heatmap
As one who has written many millions of lines of code I can tell you that even I may have had a bug or two in my code.
Order from chaos
Quote: DRich
i feel as if the ... crap... that im seeing is... should have been tested. its like they dont even care... like there was zero testing whatsoever. I cant write a piece of code that would pass first glance, and that is a for sure thing. I am not a professional programmer at all. I cant say that my job doesnt involve programming though. I know what I am doing and know that what I am seeing shouldnt happen within a production environment. Its sloppy and when people who dont know how to program stuff see these inconsistencies i know they are thinking that people like you and me are held to a higher standard and mistakes shouldnt be made at that level.
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June 8th, 2020 at 6:34:35 AM permalink
The newest fad in application development is called "Agile", marketed under a variety of names, but all of it premised on rapid development and deployment of multiple releases.
A term of art in Agile is "M.V.P." Not Most Valuable Player, but rather Minimum Viable Product. With MVP, you release a version of your product as soon as it won't explode immediately upon being loaded. The rationale is that in the old days developers waited until their product was nearly perfect, and as a result spent too long doing testing, debugging and refinement, when a product that met a very low level of quality could have been released to paying customers much sooner. Today, customers are enlisted in resolving errors in the software, doing a job historically reserved to internal testers.
The term "bug" was originally coined by Admiral Grace Hopper, USN, who discovered actual insects had infested a very large, over-heated, expensive piece of mainframe hardware that she was building in the 1950's. The term was later applied to errors in actual code.
"Bugs' don't exist in code anymore, since the failing pieces of an application are knowingly allowed to make it into products released to the buying public. Nobody wants to install version 1.0 of anything, since it's now freely acknowledged to be something that only needed to meet an announced release date, regardless of level of quality.
Having left the business in 2018 after more than 40 years, I have seen what this attitude has done to conscientious professionals who used to take pride in what they did. It's driven them out of the business, or allowed them to no longer give a damn about what they do. If it's good enough for the marketing department, out the door it goes.
LuckyPhow
Quote: racquet
Having left the business in 2018 after more than 40 years...
Me, too! Retired in 2011.
... in the old days developers waited until their product was nearly perfect
I largely agree with your comments about untested software being delivered to customers. However, the complexity of the world today -- and the rapidity with which it is changing -- makes it impossible to test thoroughly. No software stands alone any longer, The vast array of internet technology with which any software product interacts is constantly changing. Even if one released completely tested "perfect" software, new technology developments tomorrow may cause a problem.
The term "bug" was originally coined by Admiral Grace Hopper, USN, ...
Ummm... for whatever it's worth, the July 1984 Byte magazine suggests there's more to the story. On page 32 of that issue, John Lord calls attention to a letter written by Thomas Alva Edison to his representative in France:
Quote: Thomas Alva Edison, 11-Nov-1878
The first step is intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise -- this thing gives out and then that -- Bugs -- as such little faults are called -- show themselves.
No disrespect to Admiral Hopper, who did so much both for technology (COBOL) and for women in America's armed services.
Quote: LuckyPhow
COBOL was my first professional programming job. I was 17 and hired at a hospital because I already knew COBOL and worked for very low wages. I only kept that job about six months until I went off to college.
Turns out Edison does in fact deserve credit, although there is a story in the link below that describes the story as I recall Admiral Hopper telling it at a conference I attended in 1975. Not that she first told it there, but that's the version I have believed since then. She said that they actually taped the moth carcass in the log book, which the ComputerWorld story verifies. Too bad Thomas Alva said it first.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2515435/moth-in-the-machine--debugging-the-origins-of--bug-.html#:~:text=Did%20Grace%20Hopper%20really%20invent,bug'%20to%20describe%20software%20errors%3F&text=It's%20an%20oft%2Drepeated%20tale,Harvard%20University's%20Mark%20II%20calculator.
I programmed in COBOL from 1972 until I retired in 2018, on IBM360 or similar platforms, using the same tools to access the mainframe as I started with, albeit now on a PC-based terminal emulator instead of the inestimable 3270 "green screen."
At my last job before retirement the sole remaining mainframe team got roped into the Agile madness, in spite of the fact that what we were doing about 90% of the time was production support and trying to understand thirty year old code without a single page of documentation. The company had thrown away all the documentation sometime in the 1990s because they were sure that "the mainframe is going away in a few years anyway." Daily Agile "stand-ups" were a joke with us, because most of us were too old and fat to stand for more than a minute or two. Knee and hip replacements seriously impact "agility."
At that 1975 conference, Hopper also told about her first encounter with a nanosecond. As she told it, being a good naval officer, she sent down to the quartermaster for a box of nanoseconds, and he obliged by sending her some, which she told us she had brought with her to the meeting. She handed out a bunch of copper wires that were precisely 11.785 inches long, which is how far light travels in one-billionth of a second.
I still have that nanosecond in my desk drawer at home.
tringlomane
You sure it's not 11.805 inches? 😜
Quote: tringlomane
Actually, we're both wrong.
186,282 miles per second = 983,568,960 feet per second = 11,802,827,520 inches per second, divided by 1,000,000,000 (a nano-second is one billionth of a second) = 11.802827520 inches.
I just re-measured my actual copper nanosecond. Shrinkage has occurred. George Costanza would understand.
ChesterDog
The Wiz's and JB's new calculator gives the exact distance traveled by light in a vacuum in a nanosecond:
11.80285267716535433070866141732283464566929133858 inches
(The underlined block of digits repeats.)
Use the definitions of the meter and the inch:
1 meter = distance traveled by light in 1 / 299792458 second
1 inch = 2.54 x 10-2 meter