the codist - programmerthink

Quality Requires QA

Published: 01/19/2015

Today I read an analysis of why Facebook's iOS app has such dismal ratings.. Surprise, surprise, they don't believe in QA. I've spent more than 3 decades writing apps, and I've seen this happen a lot and it always winds up terrible.

Reminds me of a post I wrote 4 years ago QA! QA? We don't need no stinking QA!.

"As you may know, Facebook does not have big QA teams... we believe that developers are responsible for their own code, and they're supposed to write the tests to do that." is what an engineering manager from Facebook said. This makes me laugh, or groan, or cry.

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The Big Bang And Other Stupidities

Published: 12/02/2014

At the place I am currently contracting they are in the midst of a giant replacement of everything project. My part of it, an iOS app, is mostly done.

The bulk of the dozen or so applications are either incomplete, untested, or not even started; yet the deadline is now set to the end of this year.

Why do people do this? After 3 decades as a programmer I can tell what's possible and what has a chance of some imaginary number of happening.

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Thankful To Be A Programmer

Published: 11/26/2014

In the US today we celebrate Thanksgiving, and I really feel thankful that I can be a programmer.

For over 33 years now I've been writing code professionally, never going more than 3 weeks without writing something. It's hard to imagine how many lines I've written.

There is nothing like the creativity, the discipline, the desire to learn, the ability to make something that started with nothing but a blank screen. I was accepted into a PhD program in Chemistry before I decided more school was not for me and got my first job in October of 1981.

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The Story Of DeltaGraph

Published: 11/23/2014

DeltaGraph is the one Macintosh application I led the development of that is still alive today, 26 years after I wrote the first line of code. It's also still the original codebase, likely heavily modified (now at version 7, my last version was 3) but never rewritten. You can still buy it today from the current owner RedRock.

I shudder to think what the source code looks like today. There are likely few commercial apps still alive today that were first written in the late 80's and never had a rewrite.

Even though the timeframe is a long time ago, it's still an interesting tale. Given the popularity of my post What Writing - And Selling - Software Was Like In The 80's, I guess one more story is in order.

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