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Testing is important, regardless of the era you develop software in. Focus is also important, even these days. This guy worked at Microsoft in 90's - 00's, and

Testing is important, regardless of the era you develop software in. Focus is also important, even these days. This guy worked at Microsoft in 90's - 00's, and claims that it's the lack of concentration these days that leads to buggy code. I've used a lot of MS stuff in the last 30 years and there were many bugs and instabilities. One of the most brilliant things I use these days is our CI/CD pipelines, which has enabled many individuals to collaborate, and deploy (mostly) reliable code to production frequently, daily if not hourly. Tests are critical in enabling this. Perhaps the poster's views make more sense for waterfall-ish, once every 6 monthly or yearly releases.

username90 5y ago
In the early 90s you had a few megabytes of ram, running out of ram was a normal thing so your programs had to handle it everywhere. That makes the kind of testing we do on modern computers useless, our tests only works if we don't have ram issues or other parts of the system fails. The fact that programs back then still worked quite reliably is a miracle. And then you look at today when hardware is super reliable, people have forgotten that running out of ram can lead to bugs etc, yet we still have plenty of strange bugs in software that never should have had any bugs in the first place. If people today learned systems and wrote things with the same care they did back then you wouldn't have all of those bugs. But instead shipping bugs is fine etc, we took all the advancements and used it to push features faster rather than make things reliable.
lambdasquirrel 5y ago
Yeah, I agreed with the article except on testing / QA. I was skeptical of these at first too, but in retrospect, it was not okay to externalize the cost of testing onto other people. In those companies I've worked where we released in some waterfall-ish manner and/or QA was important, we have both.

username90 5y ago

In the early 90s you had a few megabytes of ram, running out of ram was a normal thing so your programs had to handle it everywhere. That makes the kind of testing we do on modern computers useless, our tests only works if we don't have ram issues or other parts of the system fails. The fact that programs back then still worked quite reliably is a miracle. And then you look at today when hardware is super reliable, people have forgotten that running out of ram can lead to bugs etc, yet we still have plenty of strange bugs in software that never should have had any bugs in the first place. If people today learned systems and wrote things with the same care they did back then you wouldn't have all of those bugs. But instead shipping bugs is fine etc, we took all the advancements and used it to push features faster rather than make things reliable.

lambdasquirrel 5y ago

Yeah, I agreed with the article except on testing / QA. I was skeptical of these at first too, but in retrospect, it was not okay to externalize the cost of testing onto other people. In those companies I've worked where we released in some waterfall-ish manner and/or QA was important, we have both.