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This is actually a story about the triumph of continuous integration and staged rollout. By shipping code constantly, but slowly rolling it out to users - bugs

by dkopi 11y ago

This is actually a story about the triumph of continuous integration and staged rollout. By shipping code constantly, but slowly rolling it out to users - bugs can be detected very quickly by the users themselves, instead of employing large QA teams. Keeping a central code repository, automating builds, frequent commits and automatic tests for code are taking away a lot of load for QA teams.

reid 11y ago
You are correct! I'm a programmer at Yahoo -- deploying multiple times a day to production, with the confidence your code will work, feels great. Manual ("batch-release") deployments have been forbidden for over a year, which is a forcing function to change development process to allow deploying to production continuously multiple times a day. This requires robust test and deployment automation and for engineers to better understand what they build. It's pretty nice overall!
- throwayahoops9 11y ago
  Forgive the throwaway -- but how does Yahoo define "will work?" Ignoring the calls against the UX change of several years ago, your own user feedback pages at https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809 https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809 make it pretty clear that longstanding issues such as spam (the same ring of spammers has operated for multiple years as Ultimate Stock Alerts, PennyStockAlerts and ExplosiveOTC and others -- simple Bayesian filtering could have solved this years ago) and things like the fact that the ignore function (a pretty core piece of functionality) has never actually ignored users - merely greyed them out, but they still take up space on the screen. My point isn't to be negative about the state of Yahoo Finance; you probably don't work in that department, and after three years of neglect, most of the users are long gone. My point is that if an organization is going to rely on end users to report bugs, the organization must actually respond to those bugs. Sometimes the answer might be "No, we're not going back to the Web 1.0 UX." But ignoring the top bugs for multiple years suggests a breakdown in the feedback mechanism. If Yahoo doesn't care, that's fine, it's just business. But it seems more likely that Yahoo doesn't even know there's a problem, because there's no way for user feedback to make it to the developers.
grillvogel 11y ago
obvious bugs in basic functionality can be detected by automation the nastiest bugs will be found by either a manual tester or your customer.
jessaustin 11y ago
...triumph of continuous integration and staged rollout. This makes sense to me. The fact that this wouldn't have worked at the old-style "enterprisey" places we used to work at doesn't say much in general. (It may not work at Y! either, but it seems possible...)
yborg 11y ago
This is actually a story about the triumph of ecosystem lock-in and training consumers to exchange high quality for low price or new shiny. It's outsourcing your testing to your customers. When you are either shipping free/freemium apps, or are a company that rigidly controls all APIs to their system (Twitter/Facebook), you can force the users to swallow any level of quality you choose to give them.

by dkopi 11y ago

reid 11y ago

You are correct! I'm a programmer at Yahoo -- deploying multiple times a day to production, with the confidence your code will work, feels great. Manual ("batch-release") deployments have been forbidden for over a year, which is a forcing function to change development process to allow deploying to production continuously multiple times a day. This requires robust test and deployment automation and for engineers to better understand what they build. It's pretty nice overall!

throwayahoops9 11y ago
Forgive the throwaway -- but how does Yahoo define "will work?" Ignoring the calls against the UX change of several years ago, your own user feedback pages at https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809 https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809 make it pretty clear that longstanding issues such as spam (the same ring of spammers has operated for multiple years as Ultimate Stock Alerts, PennyStockAlerts and ExplosiveOTC and others -- simple Bayesian filtering could have solved this years ago) and things like the fact that the ignore function (a pretty core piece of functionality) has never actually ignored users - merely greyed them out, but they still take up space on the screen. My point isn't to be negative about the state of Yahoo Finance; you probably don't work in that department, and after three years of neglect, most of the users are long gone. My point is that if an organization is going to rely on end users to report bugs, the organization must actually respond to those bugs. Sometimes the answer might be "No, we're not going back to the Web 1.0 UX." But ignoring the top bugs for multiple years suggests a breakdown in the feedback mechanism. If Yahoo doesn't care, that's fine, it's just business. But it seems more likely that Yahoo doesn't even know there's a problem, because there's no way for user feedback to make it to the developers.

grillvogel 11y ago

obvious bugs in basic functionality can be detected by automation the nastiest bugs will be found by either a manual tester or your customer.

jessaustin 11y ago

...triumph of continuous integration and staged rollout. This makes sense to me. The fact that this wouldn't have worked at the old-style "enterprisey" places we used to work at doesn't say much in general. (It may not work at Y! either, but it seems possible...)

yborg 11y ago

This is actually a story about the triumph of ecosystem lock-in and training consumers to exchange high quality for low price or new shiny. It's outsourcing your testing to your customers. When you are either shipping free/freemium apps, or are a company that rigidly controls all APIs to their system (Twitter/Facebook), you can force the users to swallow any level of quality you choose to give them.