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maze3 wrote: Developers: Sorry about this, but could you details the issue a bit better, do you have some images of what the pilot was doing?
Developers: It was a user error.
Oh gee, that sounds familiar. 
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And then factor in support when you have a, let's call it suboptimal, product.
There the 'it's not my/our fault' really gets to shine. EG:I could not use a slightly advanced feature on an internet connection (open a port to the outside) and documented it had to be a problem ISP side. They kept repeating the same inane and refuted advice mixed with telling me what they couldn't do, never said a word to what they could do, until someone (bless him) decided my cablemodem was a bit old. They sent a replacement and stuff worked. Don't want to know what would have happened if my modem had been newish.
So I should be happy. And I am.
But look a bit closer and you will see that their actual assistance was zilk, without my own knowledge I would have been helpless, and that they probably easily avoided learning anything from this small incident, the more so since not closing an issue is regarded as bad perfomance. The guy who helped my out probably thought he did a good deed and left it there.
Upshot: support is (another) step down from product quality and even more likely to suffer under the letal mix of under pressure psychology and management. Quite comparable to boeing saying they will fix the software when they should fix the plane, and then having more critical (software) flaws discovered. Software to the rescue! Then support gets kicked up the ladder (to communication and higher) who are obviously completely unsuited for this job, but cannot admit it.
There are real disasters waiting to happen. But it won't be my fault (/s. I regard this sentence as the first law of psychology so I keep using it in sarcastic mode). I've just put on Industrial Disease (Dire Straits). Good for the mood.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: Have you ever seen an (non-Boeing) aeroplane or bridge being built using the Agile methodology?
Well said. Nothing in the real world that I'm aware of uses Agile except supposedly software development. I think that says something (either about my ignorance or the stupidity of Agile, I suspect the latter, not the former.)
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I'd also point out that physical engineering has thousands or hundreds of years of experience in building the things they build, where software has decades. Also, the time from design to implementation in their world is decades or years, not weeks.
They are different disciplines in that way; software can be (relatively) easily changed, bridges cannot. Thus, it might make sense to have different approaches.
I think the underlying point Marc's driving at is valid, though. There are areas of development where agile simply isn't acceptable: life-critical devices, software operating aircraft, financial markets, etc. Developers in those fields probably need to take an approach closer to engineering.
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All manufacturing uses the agile methodology; they just don't call it agile, and everyone does the same thing every sprint.
Software is a special case, though, because it's more like bespoke carpentry, where the whole process, from ideation to design to production, can be carried out by one person -- or for bigger things, like making pianos, three guys get a leg each.
It's just a process for doing your daily work. Whether it's better or worse than other methods is purely a matter of taste -- for my tastes, it doesn't matter which method is followed (and I've done 'em all).
Just get the work done. If the process becomes your work, you're not a developer, any more.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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No, that's not agile; manufacturing has a clear and well-defined endproduct; there's no basement of a house while being undecided about the amount of stories, or the amount of stairs and elevators.
The only stuff that's agile outside our own trade, is pharmacy; medication that doesn't work, but has reliable side-effects gets re-marketed to that side-effect as being the main thing.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: medication that doesn't work, but has reliable side-effects gets re-marketed to that side-effect as being the main thing.
I'll have to assume that you have more knowledge than I about little blue pills.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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when the plane you are on crashes it tends to leave a mark on you,
when the bridge you're on crashes it tends to damage the paintwork,
when the app you're on crashes it just pisses you off.
after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!
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lopatir wrote: when the app you're on crashes it just pisses you off.
That may be true for a lot of them; but sometimes an error may cause financial damage or endanger health.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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that's why I absolutely stay away from banking apps on my phone,
touch screens weren't designed for folks like me with bent and fat fingers.
Do you accept the T&C ... [as in you click the wrong thing it's your fault] No! damn, accidentally clicked Yes,
...uninstall ...no not: update
...uninstall ...uninstall ...UNINSTALL you POS
...finally
after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!
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After 10 years engineering and building a plane: *safety inspectors doing years of rigorous testing in all manner of extreme conditions*
After 10 months of engineering and building a website: *our test team seeing the home page doesn't throw a 500 error*
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I'm very reluctant to put the word "engineering" after "software". There isn't the same level of agreement about how to do things in the software community as there is in the engineering community. We have competing language families, processes, methodologies, and even design patterns (the latter being a stab at something that starts to look like engineering).
Engineering over-designs systems by a considerable factor to reduce the risk of failure. What's the equivalent in software, maybe building lots of defensive checks into the code? Still a pale imitation.
On the other hand, a customer who came back to the engineering team saying that he wanted his bridge lengthened by 200m on its "next release" would be laughed out of the room, as would someone who took his car to a mechanic and asked for it to be fixed ("patched") while still traveling down the road.
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Greg Utas wrote: as would someone who took his car to a mechanic and asked for it to be fixed ("patched") while still traveling down the road.
Tesla?
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TSLAQ? 
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Had to look up that.
I just don't understand that religion.
I also believe batteries is a dead end, and the future lies in fuel cells.
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Greg Utas wrote: Engineering over-designs systems by a considerable factor to reduce the risk of failure. What's the equivalent in software, maybe building lots of defensive checks into the code? Still a pale imitation.
We can't afford the microseconds, you know...
I have been through several "ages" of SW development. When I started my studies (end 1970s), machines were so slow that there was a good reason to do all sorts of (unsafe) tricks to make the programs fast enought to be useful. Then we had some years ever faster machines, and the word was more or less "code any way you want; don't worry about speed - just switch to the next generation hardware if it is too slow". So coders ignored complexity issues of both data structures and algorithms (1980s). But as problem sizes grew, algorithmic complexity became important, and we started a new race against the microseconds that still lasts.
It has more or less become an obsession with us. We can never state "It is fast enough!" - if I can do it faster than you, then I am a better developer. Like, I made this Sudoko solver (not primarily for solving Sudoko puzzles, but to illustrate backtracking). The most difficult puzzle I found took 0.6 sec to solve. When I mentioned this to some other developers, I was immediately turned down: It can be done much faster than that! ... But who needs to solve Sudoko puzzles in much less than 0.6 sec? Beating each other by milliseconds is far more important than having robust code, even when the speed is really useful for nothing else than winning the race.
I learned a lesson quite early:
When PCs were entering the mainstream market, I talked with an architect who had got one. In the early days, drawing on a PC was out of the question; it was used for calculating project costs. Their main program went through the budget to verify that they had included the cost of all the required elements - door handles and locks and whatever. This architect told that in the first use of this program, it had reminded them of overlooked expenses significantly exceeding the cost of the PC and the software. The company was awarded the contract (on the adjusted budget), so the PC paid for itself in full on its very first serious job!
So I was curious about the PC hardware. CPU, harddisk ...
No, they didn't have any harddisk.
What?? The A: floppy held DOS and this database application, the B: floppy held their project data.
But - running it from floppies will take ages!
The architect shrugged: Maybe half an hour, maybe a couple hours on huge projects.
What? You can't wait for a couple hours to have the results?
The architect shook his head over my ignorance: Doing similar checks "by hand", without the aid of a computer, had used to require at least two man weeks, it could take a man month or more for bigger projects. Now they had the job done in a mere hour or two, automatically, actually at zero man hours! What are you talking about - why should we need to have it much faster than that?
If our goal was to give the users what they want and need, we have lots of resources to do that. But we rather enter into microsecond p*ssing contests. I think it is a great pity.
(Btw, these p*ssing contest are not always about microseconds; it can be any "quality" that is highly esteemed by coders. But speed is the dominant one.)
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This one?
xkcd: Voting Software[^]
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Hey now, don't bury it _my_ desert.
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maze3 wrote: In contrast, software flaws can be fixed and updated/spread more rapidly then hardware flaws.
By the same token, newly introduced flaws or bugs are spread more rapidly to those trusting end users...especially mobile.
Confession...I once broke the auto-update feature for one of our products...not fun. Bugs happen. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Bridges collapse, planes crash, the little piece of string holding up my blinds broke.
And so does my software contain a couple of bugs.
The difference is that my software changes constantly, is on a tight budget, has no budget for R&D at all and has a strict deadline.
Yet, my software works quite well.
Until someone uses all kinds of power tools, external software and social hacking to make it break or get in.
Trust me, if I had the physical equivalent of the tools hackers use to break software, I'd be able to break bridges and planes.
And let's be honest, if you used a sledgehammer to wreck your neighbors house no one would blame the structural integrity of the house, yet when hackers do the same to software, it's the software that's at fault.
That said, a lot of bad programmers and crap software exist and sometimes I'm ashamed of the industry 
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A problem I face all the time on my own workplace is that software is considered to be malleable. Well, it technically is, but to achieve safety (or even something resembling quality), the mindset has to shift towards an engineering "think first" aproach. My product managers don't want to. They prefer a more artisinal aproach: telling roughly what they want, seeing the result, having things change, seeing the result of that and so on.
I suppose, the main issue with software is this aproach working at first. Sure, it breaks down later (let's say because the main engine of what I'm building isn't capable of something that TOTALLY HAS TO BE ADDED a month or two later) but at first, it's malleable and the cost of this nonsense is all-too-easy to dump on the programmer because hey, I'm the one introducing all the bugs, aren't I?
Building a bridge or a plane, it's kinda obvious that things have to be thought through in advance. But building software, there's no immediate need to do anything in advance. And as people are, they tend to ignore everything that comes tomorow for the sake of today.
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<rant>
It is astounding to me how little things have actually changed. Like. Ever.
Software creation (don't like "engineering" or "development," try that on) has, in my experience beginning in the '70s, always suffered from silver-bullet-syndrome.
(See: No Silver Bullet - Wikipedia)
Example: Agile et al. was an answer to the perceived deficiencies of waterfall. It became THE hammer in a world of nails for many people.
The fact is, (ok, I admit, TO ME) all methodologies have their logical strengths and place; they aren't mutually exclusive and can be combined in a large project.
As someone mentioned above, there are so many languages! I would add: And Frameworks! And libraries! And IDEs! And, for that matter operating systems and db and server platforms!
Paradigms shift. I get that. But why the elephant do we need ALL these? Except to give creator$ and early adopter$ an edge.
Imagine how much time and money could have been saved over the decades if we'd settled for just a couple of languages with necessarily different strengths.
</rant>
[deep calming breath]
I just needed to get that out of my system.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
Cheers,
Mike Fidler
"I intend to live forever - so far, so good." Steven Wright
"I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met." Also Steven Wright
"I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn't matter." Steven Wright yet again.
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MikeTheFid wrote: Example: Agile et al. was an answer to the perceived deficiencies of waterfall. It became THE hammer in a world of nails for many people.
<rant>
I am shocked by how many young SW developers know one thing about waterfall: It is bad and must be shunned away from at all costs.
But they don't have a clue about what it really is about. (Like, as I use as an example, the idea that you should try to identify the problem before you start solving it  ).
Even those who have some slight idea about its real meaning have been given an impression of the way it worked out that makes me shake my head. They may explain it as if every step was done once, and then the results carved in stone and would never never be changed, it had to be everlasting. You never can go back and revise or complete stuff in an earlier stage. Not even in a second version of the product, it seems, and most certainly not when developing one given version: You never swim up the river.
Seriously: Riverfall in practical use never was the way it is described today! It was much more open to revisions, reconsideration and continous adaption based on experiences collected during the development work. Its promninent feature was that you should learn to crawl before you learn to walk. I still think that poor planning is one of our biggest SW development problems of today.
Agility is fine at any stage of a project. But when it replaces all sorts of planning, problem analysis, architecture and design work, then it is not as good. Agile principles are great, of course, and allow for both analysis and design, even before you start coding. I am not comparing riverfall ideals (/horror visions) to agile ideals, but pragmatic riverfall to agile in practice. To how often the analysis I do as the first step are pushed aside: We have to get som code running! (Even when the analysis is already there, it is pushed aside, ignored, as a nightmare reminiscence from the dreadful riverfall age.)
< /rant>
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Have you noticed that a new house has the same house basic architecture and shape as all other houses previously built. A new car has the same architecture and basic shape as all other cars built. A new building has the same basic architecture and shape as all other buildings previously built. A new bridge has the same basic architecture and slightly varying shape as previously built bridges. But new software is different in its intended audiences and functions. Its architecture and shape will vary from product to product. Therefore it difficult to nail down specific engineering principles for software development.
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Bad first plan, Hela ended Odin before endgame for a friend. (6)
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