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The problem here is that if someone dies while using your medical device and you have a "warning hygeine" process then there's a sound legal argument that you k

The problem here is that if someone dies while using your medical device and you have a "warning hygeine" process then there's a sound legal argument that you knew there were problems in the device that you chose to instead paper over and ignore. It doesn't matter that it makes sense to software engineers. What you have to consider is how a "jury of your peers" will react to you calmly and rationally explaining that a newer version of the compiler added some new warnings, but you decided that because the code has been running just fine for decades that it's totally okay to not address those warnings. It raises questions about how seriously you're actually taking software quality. Take your "misleading indentation" warning. If you choose to ignore that warning, you're setting yourself up because I can make a great argument that you don't care that the indentation is misleading. And in fact that you're ignoring the hazards of following misleading indentation which is that another person reading your code could misread it and introduce a defect. And that in fact your policy is to allow some defects, including a possible defect which has killed the plaintiff.

michaelt 6y ago
Any organisation developing safety-critical code will already be following rules strict enough that they have an established deviation approval and documentation procedure. And frankly, the idea that people writing software where defects could kill people would prefer not to be shown new defects because fixing them is an inconvenience is a pretty insulting view of that industry's professionalism and ethics.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Warnings are not defects. You might be surprised how conservative (parts of?) that industry are.
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  And then I might ask you "so why did you apply for deviation on this warning? Warnings are bad, right? So shouldn't you fix a compiler warning if at all possible?" And then you might reply "Well no because this particular warning would require us to change some code that's really hard to change correctly so instead of spending the time and expense eliminating a potential defect we just left it in."
the8472 6y ago
That hypothetical engineer would then argue with the counterfactual universe (our universe) where warnings were never added in the first place because people were afraid of adding warnings. I.e. punishing people for having this process sets the wrong incentives.
Konohamaru 6y ago
> If you choose to ignore that warning, you're setting yourself up because I can make a great argument that you don't care that the indentation is misleading. Aka. the no brown M&Ms (not the rapper!) policy https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/02/14/146880432/the-truth-about-van-halen-and-those-brown-m-ms https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/02/14/146880432/...
wglb 6y ago
There is a long distance traveled here between fine tuning warnings and medically critical software. The fact is that building such medically critical software (which I have done) has many more considerations than warning levels of c compilers. Additionally, there is the C language and what the standard says are two different things. Finally, the vast area of standard specified undefined and implementation defined areas substantially impact writing correct software.

michaelt 6y ago

Any organisation developing safety-critical code will already be following rules strict enough that they have an established deviation approval and documentation procedure. And frankly, the idea that people writing software where defects could kill people would prefer not to be shown new defects because fixing them is an inconvenience is a pretty insulting view of that industry's professionalism and ethics.

adrianN 6y ago
Warnings are not defects. You might be surprised how conservative (parts of?) that industry are.
jschwartzi 6y ago
And then I might ask you "so why did you apply for deviation on this warning? Warnings are bad, right? So shouldn't you fix a compiler warning if at all possible?" And then you might reply "Well no because this particular warning would require us to change some code that's really hard to change correctly so instead of spending the time and expense eliminating a potential defect we just left it in."

the8472 6y ago

That hypothetical engineer would then argue with the counterfactual universe (our universe) where warnings were never added in the first place because people were afraid of adding warnings. I.e. punishing people for having this process sets the wrong incentives.

Konohamaru 6y ago

> If you choose to ignore that warning, you're setting yourself up because I can make a great argument that you don't care that the indentation is misleading. Aka. the no brown M&Ms (not the rapper!) policy https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/02/14/146880432/the-truth-about-van-halen-and-those-brown-m-ms https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/02/14/146880432/...

wglb 6y ago

There is a long distance traveled here between fine tuning warnings and medically critical software. The fact is that building such medically critical software (which I have done) has many more considerations than warning levels of c compilers. Additionally, there is the C language and what the standard says are two different things. Finally, the vast area of standard specified undefined and implementation defined areas substantially impact writing correct software.