Month: June 2017

When I first started as a developer, the process was simple. You picked (or were assigned) a bug to fix, you fixed it, and then you sent it off for testing. …and then, sometimes, your tester (another developer) argued that you’d fixed the bug in entirely the wrong way and should completely redo the fix. Sometimes he also provided information you didn’t know about that proved he was definitely correct. Then we added a design requirement. Before doing a fix, you had to have another developer sign off on what you were going to do, which meant that many...

What is the value in what you do? As programmers, we tend to do what we do for two main reasons: to build something cool, or to draw a paycheck. Those paychecks tend to be pretty decently sized, because we create a lot of value for the companies we work for. But how is that value quantified? To an employer, value is probably quantified financially: are we generating more income than the cost to keep us on? This is why (I’ve read – I don’t have personal experience here) developers at a company that makes and sells software get...

I heard a phrase I liked recently: software testing is ensuring goodness. [Alexander Tarlinder on Software Engineering Radio] How do we ensure that our software is good, and further, what does good even mean? For a first approximation, let’s say that good software does what it’s supposed to. How do we define what the software is supposed to do? That could mean it does what the design says it does, that it does what the user wants, or that it does what the user actually needs. This gives us the first few things to test against: we check that...