4 ms·
"Safely assume" is an oxymoron. Assumptions are a form of risk taking. The upside reward is that you save the cost of testing (and thus eliminating) your assump
by fineline 10y ago
"Safely assume" is an oxymoron. Assumptions are a form of risk taking. The upside reward is that you save the cost of testing (and thus eliminating) your assumption. The (potential) downside is the complete failure of everything resting on that assumption. In many cases, the upside is small and knowable, the downside is hard to predict or contain - i.e. the worst kind of asymetric risk. Thus as a rule of thumb, assumptions are very bad practice, and should always be called out as liabilities in contract terms - e.g. "The cost of repair or rework due to any bugs found in the provided libraries shall be borne by X."
- seanwilson 10y agoDo you have any concrete examples where a third party library turned out to be the major factor of a project failing? I've done plenty of projects that rely on a large number of at least moderately popular open source components for example and I've never once had a major problem. Obviously all assumptions carry risk, you should have good contract terms etc. but from experience this element is not a high risk at all. Clients tend to understand the elements that are out of your control. Changing requirements is a vastly higher risk for example.