I will however, concede on one thing. Not all software products are equal, and there are some that really do require tests. If we look at the recent plane crashes of those 737 max planes they pointed to a faulty controller that reported that the plane was stalling when it wasn't. I then sent the plane into a node dive to gain enough speed to safely fly.
Things like this, I believe, are exempt from the hacker method where you try to innovate as fast as possible and deal with errors as they come because on systems like that you can't rapidly deploy changes and fixes. But you also have to understand your code and system and how everything works.
The final cause of the 737 crashes are still under investigation. I do know that Boeing uses TDD. If the initial findings are correct and the issue occurred because of a controller incorrectly sent messages to the automated system that the plane is stalling, why didn't the tests catch it?
You can say that they didn't have enough tests or that they the bad tests, but the core issue is that no one understood the system well enough to catch that issue. No one took the time and effort to do that and it cost people their lives.
shadow, let me get this straight. You are saying that avoiding tests in order to not find bugs that tests would reveal before deployment in order for the users to "find the bugs" for you, is the way for developers to avoid being lazy?
I don't buy that skimping on pre-deployment QA speeds up innovation, and I don't think that quality only matters in life and death scenarios like the plane problem you mentioned. The world is facing the opposite problem. Most software, products, and services, barely even work. I'm constantly getting annoyed by things not working quite right, or not as well as I would like them to. You know what would be truly innovative? Products and code that actually works!
What is more, I feel that true innovation is what emerges when you insist on extreme quality. If we all started enforcing things that are currently impractical, like 100% code coverage, what would happen is we would innovate to make achieving that less painful.
I will however, concede on one thing. Not all software products are equal, and there are some that really do require tests. If we look at the recent plane crashes of those 737 max planes they pointed to a faulty controller that reported that the plane was stalling when it wasn't. I then sent the plane into a node dive to gain enough speed to safely fly.
Things like this, I believe, are exempt from the hacker method where you try to innovate as fast as possible and deal with errors as they come because on systems like that you can't rapidly deploy changes and fixes. But you also have to understand your code and system and how everything works.
The final cause of the 737 crashes are still under investigation. I do know that Boeing uses TDD. If the initial findings are correct and the issue occurred because of a controller incorrectly sent messages to the automated system that the plane is stalling, why didn't the tests catch it?
You can say that they didn't have enough tests or that they the bad tests, but the core issue is that no one understood the system well enough to catch that issue. No one took the time and effort to do that and it cost people their lives.
shadow, let me get this straight. You are saying that avoiding tests in order to not find bugs that tests would reveal before deployment in order for the users to "find the bugs" for you, is the way for developers to avoid being lazy?
I don't buy that skimping on pre-deployment QA speeds up innovation, and I don't think that quality only matters in life and death scenarios like the plane problem you mentioned. The world is facing the opposite problem. Most software, products, and services, barely even work. I'm constantly getting annoyed by things not working quite right, or not as well as I would like them to. You know what would be truly innovative? Products and code that actually works!
What is more, I feel that true innovation is what emerges when you insist on extreme quality. If we all started enforcing things that are currently impractical, like 100% code coverage, what would happen is we would innovate to make achieving that less painful.
I don't think you fully understand the hacker method at all. You can enforce standards without having to write and maintain thousands of tests.