I agree -- when it was just a couple of people developing a package (Thom
Knoll et. al. for Photoshop), one person (I know the guy's dad but don't
know his son's name) for CoolEdit and Nick Bradbury for HomeSite and
TopStyle web editing software, the quality of code is consistently high.
The project is also a labor of love so releases are pushed back until it is
"right". When these people get bought out or grow much larger, development
gets parceled out to various groups and the interaction between these groups
is about as good as any committee (ie: lousy).
Used to work for Microsoft as a hardware lab manager maintaining the
equipment used for testing various applications. I would sit in on meetings
where triage was being done -- what bugs are showstoppers and what bugs can
be fixed by a slipstream release. And then, you get into the interactions
and dependencies between modules... DLL Hell indeed...
In the case of Microsoft, no one programmer rally gets to run the finished
application until it is in pre-beta and by then, 90% of the code has been
locked down. Lousy way to run a company but that is the model they have
chosen and sometimes, you just have to shoot the developers and start
shipping what you got.
An interesting site that addresses this is Joel on Software:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/[/rant]
> -----Original Message-----
> From: motm@yahoogroups.com [mailto:motm@yahoogroups.com] On
> Behalf Of Kenneth Elhardt
> Sent: Friday, July 14, 2006 6:37 PM
> To: MOTM
> Subject: Re: [motm] Ken Elhardt's Patchbook Series
>
>
> Jason Proctor writes:
> >>and having been in software development for a similar number of
> years, my opinion is that commercial "priorities", scheduling
> "decisions", and cost-cutting on various essential factors (such as
> QA) have a far greater influence on the quality of software in
> general than the IQ of the programmers concerned!<<
>
> Yes, that stuff enters into it too. But from much of the
> software I've
> bought, it seems clear that the programmer didn't even try
> running the code
> he wrote just once to see if it worked. When a company has
> been in business
> 10 years, and is on revision umpteen of a particular piece of
> software, and
> I receive it, and within minutes of first use I've found
> several major bugs,
> I'd say there is something wrong with the programmer. I
> don't know how many
> decades it should take to get it right. I've been under the
> same kinds of
> pressures and yet stuff I've written, and we're talking tons
> of miserable
> assembly code in there, has been so bug free, it's gone
> straight into coin
> operated archade games. Nobody would tolerate those bombing
> out in the
> middle of a level. It's simple. Write a line of code, or a
> routine, then
> actually run it to be sure it works. If it doesn't work,
> either fix it or
> remove it because it shouldn't be in there when the product
> ships. The
> programmer should be his own beta tester, since people hired
> to be beta
> testers are idiots just like the know-nothing sales people and poser
> excutives.
>
> Sorry for my attitude against software, but I'm fed up with
> every single
> software application I own. NONE of it works correctly.
> Even Photoshop and
> CoolEdit, the two I used to hold up as rare examples of
> things that worked
> correctly, I've had too many problems with lately because of
> moronic bugs.
> And for those software companies to take the attitude that I
> should continue
> to pay for upgrades to fix their incompetent programming is
> unacceptable,
> and in another industry would be illegal. Cars get recalled at the
> company's expense when they don't work, I shouldn't have to
> pay endlessly
> for bug fixes.
>
> Yes, I'm a little bit in a bitchy mood. I think it's that time of the
> month. Come to think of it, I have been feeling a bit girlish lately.
>
> -Elhardt
>
>
>
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