The aerospace-IT analogy is an interesting one. I have done programming in aerospace environments and am always amazed that every single screw, nut, and bolt must be redundantly inspected, QA'ed, and certified but "QA" as it applies to software checks source code indenting and not much else. We have a long way to go before application software is as bulletproof as flying.
Not really that far. The tools are already there, and available to use.
We just have to gain a culture of quality.
Which is the real problem. The technology industry has a culture of cowboys and constantly forging ahead rather than sober introspection (masturbatory blog posts aside).
My background in aviation has had a huge effect on my life in technology. Every pilot has been in a "situation" over their flying
career, some more than once. When we do our hanger flying we swap stories about how to safely get down every time. This just doesn't
happen in technology. It should.
A culture of quality has a significant cost. This is justified if lives are at stake, but that's pretty much the only case where it's justified. Grocery stores also don't check each apple 3 times independently if it's not rotten. :)
Implicit in what you're saying is that you're willing to suffer the costs if your software fails.
For me, if my banks software decides to munge some data, that's not cool. If my $2K laptop crashes, that's not cool.
More importantly, a culture of quality mainly has initial costs, after that maintaining it is a small marginal cost with significant savings in reduced defects.
Some software industries - aviation and healthcare particularly, but also to a lesser extent finance - are regulated. And have strong cultures of culture. And it works - how often are plane crashes due to "pilot error" vs. due to "software error"?
For most things, though, that's just plain unnecessary. If my free web browser crashes - well, I'm a little annoyed, but I suck it up and restart the program. And I'd much rather use that free browser that crashes than wait until they can make it perfect and crash-free.
There's an opportunity cost to everything. Time spent making sure your program never crashes is time not spent on solving new problems, and it's likely those new problems are a lot more pressing than "I need to reboot Firefox every 2-3 days because it has such horrible memory leaks."
I am not at all sympathetic to your world view. You're advocating
that we make bad software on purpose. Not only that but you're advocating placing the burden of defects as an externality onto users.
This to me is unprofessional. We have the technology and skills
to build reliable software, without significant additional cost. To
do anything else should be criminal.
I'll use an analogy. You wouldn't date a fat, ugly, dull girl if you knew
with even the most trivial effort you could date an attractive girl
who's great at conversation and loves to discuss René Magritte and
Douglas Hofstadter, would you? No. So why accept the same in software?
EDIT: I should note that here in B.C., Canada Software Engineer is a certified title. You may not legally call yourself a software engineer unless you are licensed.
Eh, you don't have to be sympathetic to my worldview. You almost certainly use software I've written anyway. ;-)
I'd strongly disagree that building reliable software can be done without significant additional cost. I spend perhaps 2/3 of my time writing tests, and then development time (on top of that) is probably doubled by code reviews. The benefit of this is that I have enough confidence in my (and others') code that I can freely improve it without worrying too much about breaking things. The downside is that I've spent 6x as long to implement a feature as I otherwise would've. That's a cost. I pay it because a.) I have to and b.) the business importance of the code I write really does justify it.
I would not pay that cost if I were hacking up a startup with zero users and iterating until I had a useful product. And I don't pay the cost when I'm prototyping new ideas within my employer - most of my work later this week has been straight hackety-hack with no tests, because I'm doing a demo for something new.
"You wouldn't date a fat, ugly, dull girl if you knew with even the most trivial effort you could date an attractive girl who's great at conversation and loves to discuss René Magritte and Douglas Hofstadter, would you?"
Haven't you heard of "Smart. Pretty. Nice. Pick two"? You generally can't have everything - not unless you happen to be a debonaire billionaire with Brad Pitt's body. (The fact that such a person doesn't exist might be further evidence that you can't have everything...) Most people date a girl who has the qualities that they care about, and they don't worry so much if she's not perfect in other ways.
I am not at all sympathetic to your world view. You're advocating that we make bad software on purpose. Not only that but you're advocating placing the burden of defects as an externality onto users.
He's saying that good software available today for $X beats flawless software available in 3 years for $5X, and I agree even if X=0. With the obvious exceptions for scenarios where people will die if it goes wrong.
This to me is unprofessional. We have the technology and skills to build reliable software, without significant additional cost.
And for some reason every organization in the world declines to use this magic bullet.
No doubt that's why all the world's best software comes from B.C.; we all know that gov't licensing is so wonderful. (By the way, they may CALL it certification, but if it is mandatory it's LICENSING no matter what the gov't calls it.)
