3 ms·
> Does a bridge Engineer find it acceptable to give notice "The bridge will fall in high winds". Not any more. But in the 19th century bridge failure was quit
by neffy 10y ago
> Does a bridge Engineer find it acceptable to give notice "The bridge will fall in high winds".
Not any more.
But in the 19th century bridge failure was quite frequent, until things like the Tay Bridge Disaster happened, and then some standards were imposed, and engineers and others were empowered to enforce high standards.
In any field you can have fast development, or you can have safe development, but you really can´t have both. It remains to be seen quite what level of software disaster it will take to bring this lesson home in our industry.
- crpatino 10y agoIf last Friday events do not, I am not sure what will.
- quantumhobbit 10y agoBringing down Twitter for part of the country for a few hours likely won't be enough. Unfortunately it will probably take people being physically hurt or shutting off most of the internet for days at a time.
- mojuba 10y agoThe tragedy is that, with non-critical software that can't kill anyone, users are happy with most bugs most of the time. Therefore we will never have legal quality standards for most types of software.
- ghurtado 10y agoI realize that you're talking about "quality standards", but depending on the industry, there are plenty of legally mandated software standards out there. You're likely to run into some of them if you haven't already: - 508 / ADA compliance - HIPAA - AICC / SCORM / cmi5 - PCI / DSS
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y agoSome of those are not very good i.e. not quality standards. Is there a quality standard for quality standards or does the buck stop there?
- ghurtado 10y agoWell, that's just the thing. Whether (we) programmers like it or not, the only relevant measure of quality in a program is whether it does the thing that the user needs it to do. In other words, "functional standards" is the only type of quality standards that you could ever expect to have for software. Things like code quality and inner loop optimization are largely irrelevant for the people who are using the software.