OT: Sens Lounge: "Pleeease won't you be.....my neighboµr"

Big Muddy

Registered User
Dec 15, 2019
8,983
4,334
I am annoyed by some piece of SW at least 10 times per day. Unbelievable that some of this stuff was even released.

Back on the crypto topic, I just finished reading “Going Infinite “, which is Michael Lewis’ account of SBF and the FTX bankruptcy. Quite entertaining and some good insight into a truly bizarre guy.
Yes, I encounter problems relatively frequently as well. They can’t be doing any testing to see if things work. Seems to be a fact of life these days.

When I do something on a website these days, I’ll often call customer service to go through the process together with them. That way, when a problem is encountered, at least someone from the company is aware of the problem. I’ve often had to find the work arounds and then tell the customer service person what I did to get things to work. Those tend to be issues where the design is just flawed and confusing versus a software bug though and you can’t do much about the bugs.

Software developers, corporate lawyers and marketing seem to have too much power within companies these days. Not much emphasis on the customer or service unfortunately.
 

Nac Mac Feegle

wee & free
Jun 10, 2011
35,435
9,846
Why is software quality going down so much, when we have millions of kids going to college/university in those fields? Western civilization is pushing out a buttload of software and IT folks.

You'd think the quality would be getting better every year?
 

FunkySeeFunkyDoo

Registered User
Feb 3, 2009
5,200
2,870
Ottawa
Why is software quality going down so much, when we have millions of kids going to college/university in those fields? Western civilization is pushing out a buttload of software and IT folks.

You'd think the quality would be getting better every year?
Well, it’s just my opinion, but sw development processes have changed quite a bit over the years…. About 20 or 25 years ago a number of “agile” methodologies became fashionable, and in the last 10 or 15 years “continuous integration/continuous deployment “ really took hold. Both of these were all about doing things faster, and the latter methodology in particular has placed much more of the onus on the developer regarding quality — I think most sw companies don’t really even have a QA team any more.

I work with a couple guys in my office that come from that background exclusively, and I’d say that they believe in software quality, but they place a much greater emphasis on the quality of the code as opposed to the quality experienced by the user. IE, they care how the sw does something more than they care about what it does.
 
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DrEasy

Out rumptackling
Sponsor
Oct 3, 2010
11,438
7,324
Stützville
Well, it’s just my opinion, but sw development processes have changed quite a bit over the years…. About 20 or 25 years ago a number of “agile” methodologies became fashionable, and in the last 10 or 15 years “continuous integration/continuous deployment “ really took hold. Both of these were all about doing things faster, and the latter methodology in particular has placed much more of the onus on the developer regarding quality — I think most sw companies don’t really even have a QA team any more.

I work with a couple guys in my office that come from that background exclusively, and I’d say that they believe in software quality, but they place a much greater emphasis on the quality of the code as opposed to the quality experienced by the user. IE, they care how the sw does something more than they care about what it does.
I think web apps like Facebook, Google Maps, Amazon etc that are usually developed and deployed using agile methodologies, seem rock solid in terms of quality (I'm not saying what they do is nice or anything), especially given the massive scale at which they need to operate. They never even take the sites down for upgrades or anything, it all happens on the fly using load balancers.

The UI is different story, but even then they do A/B testing on that stuff, and what we get is supported by evidence that it works (for them, not necessarily for us the users).

I tend to associate low quality software with desktop applications. Agile methodologies might still be used for them, but it could be that the developers don't get as much (live) feedback from users there to do anything about defects. And then you have open source software (looking at you, Mozilla!), where you can go look at all the open issues on the code repository, and you can see bugs that have been known for years literally.

In all cases, developers are pressured to deliver on tight deadlines, so IMO that's where the blame should go.
 

darude

Registered User
Nov 2, 2024
31
29
I tend to associate low quality software with desktop applications. Agile methodologies might still be used for them, but it could be that the developers don't get as much (live) feedback from users there to do anything about defects. And then you have open source software (looking at you, Mozilla!), where you can go look at all the open issues on the code repository, and you can see bugs that have been known for years literally.

Every web app is granted an automatic benefit of the doubt. When users encounter errors, especially with one of the big boys (Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.), they're given a pass or the default assumption is it's ISP related.

For every bug Mozilla's had for decades there's probably a dozen hidden from view with the other players (don't look into chrome too hard). You can find those for Facebook/Amazon/etc., but you have to seek them out because they don't tend to publish them themselves, so it's down to someone blogging / posting about it.

Amazon might be the worst offender. Just google "Amazon app bug" and you can see thousands of users frustrated by failures in the most basic functions of a shopping app.

Some of those come from the next point: of course desktop apps will have more problems. On the web apps, they own the entire infrastructure and the only worries about compatibility are in how a web app is displayed in the browser. On a desktop app they have to worry about hardware support/feature compatibility for a ton of different configurations that the dev team couldn't test. For the same reason you see a lot of the bigger players fail with their apps and have to update constsntly. 9/10ths or more of the updates your phone downloads are bug fixes, rather than feature changes.
 

Beech

Registered User
Nov 25, 2020
3,296
1,175
Watching the Lions-Jaguars game had me wishing North American sports followed Europe and demoted teams to DII.

then I remembered the Sens. We would be in DII now, wouldn't we? And would have been there for 7 years!
 
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2CHAINZ

Registered User
Feb 27, 2008
14,864
20,940
I am annoyed by some piece of SW at least 10 times per day. Unbelievable that some of this stuff was even released.

Back on the crypto topic, I just finished reading “Going Infinite “, which is Michael Lewis’ account of SBF and the FTX bankruptcy. Quite entertaining and some good insight into a truly bizarre guy.
I love going down those type of rabbit holes. The Ross Ulbricht silk road topic is an amazing rabbit hole to go down and probably my fav involving crypto.
 
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maclean

Registered User
Jan 4, 2014
8,988
2,931
Watching the Lions-Jaguars game had me wishing North American sports followed Europe and demoted teams to DII.

then I remembered the Sens. We would be in DII now, wouldn't we? And would have been there for 7 years!

I recently had a conversation like this. I was telling someone unfamiliar with North American hockey what team I cheer for and he was like, what division to they play in, like the third? And so I explained there was no demotion in the NHL and he just gave a patronising nod like, uh huh, well that explains it. And he wasn't wrong :ha:
 

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