3 ms·
> unit testing [...] or neglecting other kinds of testing that are more effective Could you elaborate? (happens I come from a background where there is no kind
by tempguy9999 7y ago
> unit testing [...] or neglecting other kinds of testing that are more effective
Could you elaborate? (happens I come from a background where there is no kind of systematic testing, which is a bit of a downer)
And 'PoC' = proof of concept?
> which justify their design and coding decisions based on what <authority> wrote in a book or blog.
Happened to me. We had an SQL-based product that ran like a dog. Much faster by the time I'd finished it (I was the local guru), but on the next iteration I found the lead programmer had ripped out the big complex SQL statements it generated, and replaced each with many simpler queries. I asked WTF he'd done that without telling anybody and he justified it by pointing to a blog article recommending that for speed.
The article ended up 'trust me, it will be faster'. Oh yes, it ran faster because the query optimiser (very cpu expensive) now had very little work to do - so in ran like a rocket when the lead programmer (ie. one single user) tested it in his laptop. But it would scale like a dog because the optimiser had been sidestepped!
In addition, lots of little queries picking data from here and there would allow inconsistent views of the data because he didn't know about transaction isolation levels.
Thanks, idiot blog author!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chii 7y agoi dont think having a blog outlining random advice is the source of the issue - it's the programmer who chose to take advice without first measuring and/or critically evaluating it. Even if martin fowler and co didn't write this, soembody else would've, and the same sort of mistakes would continue to happen. The root cause, as always, is incompetence.
- tempguy9999 7y agoIf people don't know much then they are not in a position to discriminate. It's the unknown unknowns. In the case I gave I'd reasonably agree that the lead programmer should have sat down with a stack of MSSQL books and done his homework. But even more so, the prat of a blog author, a well-known blogger in MSSQL at the time, should have done his homework and not published dangerous crap. Proclaim yourself an authority, you'd better be one! I've other examples of this too. But sometimes the end-users just can't know. I'll skip the details but due to overload at work I couldn't help our support staff properly, so they did a web search and grabbed a snippet which did what they needed. Well done for initiative, lads. It also silently disabled full trans logging on our clients production DBs. Not so good. Support staff couldn't know, they did their best, blame lies with idiot blogger 'expert'. Again.
- blub 7y agoI was referring to system and integration tests. If a system has any kind of user interaction, user testing is essential.