4 ms·

I see these issues everywhere also I know you probably mean this for software, but it's not limited to just that, and it's as ancient as humans are (or animals

by stinos 8y ago

I see these issues everywhere also I know you probably mean this for software, but it's not limited to just that, and it's as ancient as humans are (or animals, to take it further, they make mistakes as well from time to time). I mean, instead of booking.com messing up (or whatever it was) I've already arrived at a hotel once just to find out there was no trace of my booking. Someone lost the paper or forgot to write it down or so. Turning the human off an on again, a.k.a sleep, also helps with this from time to time and makes it a nasty hard to reproduce bug. And hard to fix as well. I get the analogy only holds - usually - when it's not about bugs which are reproducible time and time again. But on the other hand those are usually easier to discover and fix so maybe less of a problem. tldr; not sure how worrying it is.

thoughtspile 8y ago
Some designer wrote (Russian, of course, we're all into this stuff) something along the lines of "If you feel an area is great — you're just not familiar with it". Tried not to get carried out there, I'm already sad enough) I guess (hope) avionic / nuclear software is generally of higher quality, but must it really be so hard and expensive to develop well?
- freeone3000 8y ago
  Yes! That's the issue. Good, robust development takes time. You can estimate the number of flaws in a product by the amount of time it takes to find one - if this is measured in minutes, your product likely has thousands of errors. Actual, robust software takes thousands of hours of TESTING, nevermind development. Multiple vendor cycles. Field studies. User observation to limit system error. And unfortunately (if you're not a programmer) programmers are very, very expensive, but most software must be very cheap. So unless you're at the largest scale, your software is likely crap or very expensive, because the market won't support anything else.

by stinos 8y ago

thoughtspile 8y ago

Some designer wrote (Russian, of course, we're all into this stuff) something along the lines of "If you feel an area is great — you're just not familiar with it". Tried not to get carried out there, I'm already sad enough) I guess (hope) avionic / nuclear software is generally of higher quality, but must it really be so hard and expensive to develop well?

freeone3000 8y ago
Yes! That's the issue. Good, robust development takes time. You can estimate the number of flaws in a product by the amount of time it takes to find one - if this is measured in minutes, your product likely has thousands of errors. Actual, robust software takes thousands of hours of TESTING, nevermind development. Multiple vendor cycles. Field studies. User observation to limit system error. And unfortunately (if you're not a programmer) programmers are very, very expensive, but most software must be very cheap. So unless you're at the largest scale, your software is likely crap or very expensive, because the market won't support anything else.