Markus Gärtner commented, in part, Actually what seems to be missing is the pride and responsibility in the software world. From my point of view I can pile up a lot of technical debt, but deliver really fast.
I’m not so sure if pride is missing. Timothy Fitz seemed to be proud of the work that he was doing. Moreover, hubris is a form of pride, and there seems to be no shortage of that in our business.
You raise an important point on technical debt. It’s bad enough for us to be running up our credit card bills, but when we don’t know how much debt we’re running up, that’s really dangerous. I see this with every company that makes a conscious decision not to test things that might be important.
You cannot expect to improve your software process by one order of a magnitude. This is unrealistic, stupid and dangerous.
Right. Apropos of that: ever noticed the claims made by the tool vendors?
Ben Simo weighs in: I think that users have become so accustomed to bad software that they don’t notice the bugs — for long. Software users are accustomed to finding workarounds and the quickest way to make errors go away.
Yes, and I think this is amazing. Part of it has to do with the magical aura that we have around computers; any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke said. Magic dazzles us into non-reasoning. Here’s an example that I’ve been using for about 20 years:
You’re about to go on a trip. You take your car, which is running fine, to the mechanic for a checkup. Because he leaves work at 6:00pm, and you can’t get there until 6:30, you agree that he’ll leave your keys with the cashier at the gas bar. At 6:30 you arrive and pick up your keys. You get into the car, put the key in the ignition, and turn. Your car makes a noise (yawp!) and then suddenly goes dead. Now: is your reaction “Aw geez, I’m so lame. I’ll never understand these complicated car thingies. It must be something I did.” Or do you feel anger and resentment towards the mechanic?
It used to be that users of bad software blamed themselves, but now I think that most people simply don’t expect things to work. We’ve all become like Sam Lowry in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (the relevant scene starts at 3:34 or so in the link above, but if you haven’t seen the movie, for heaven’s sake, rent it). To top it off, when we call Central Services, we get that wonderful message: “Thank you for calling Central Services. I’m sorry due to temporary staff shortages, Central Services cannot take service calls centrally between 23:00 and 09:00 hours. Have a nice day. This has not been a recording.”
Raoul, just a reminder: the pseudonym you’ve taken is one assumed by a man who wrote vigorously, at length, and, above all, clearly.
Yes, that occurred to me (as I mentioned before the bug reports in the original post). However, there’s a heuristic that I use when testing, which I will now name The Fractal Heuristic: “Every piece of the system reflects some aspect of the entire system.” The front end of a system reflects, at least to some degree, the values of the organization that produced it; and the organization that produced it produces the other parts of the system. Further research suggests that IMVU claims 30,000,000 registered users, but the online counters in their chatmatch feature consistently register around 60,000. There are 122,000 posts and 26,000 topics in the online bug reporting system, with headers like “everything in my inventory is missing!” and “Hacked account“. In the bug tracking system, there’s a report of people not receiving mail from IMVU, to which one member replies “its a known thing that after any imvu work on page code to client that things get changed with out you knowing or doing anything…. “. And when I tried to go to the earliest of the 525 pages of headings in that tracking system, here’s what I got all over my screen:
Error:
Stack:
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I hear loud a whistling sound coming from the direction of just past the graveyard.
I wonder how many of us don’t fall for the trap Jon mentioned.
I fall into the trap when I forget that my primary mission is to reveal information, rather than to find bugs. The latter is hugely important, but not as important as the former. I learned a long time ago that finding bugs was the tester’s mission, and it’s taking me a long time to unlearn that. This generation of testers needs to pass that lesson on to the next.
This kinda harkens to James’ recent Quality Is Dead article. We’ve conditioned the average consumer to expect non-perfection. As long as the basic functionality exists and works-ish then they are happy. Well, enough to not go through the hassle of migrating yourself and the rest of your friends to a different service.
I’m not sure who said it, but inertia may be the most powerful force in the Universe. It has to be one of the most powerful forces in the Metaverse.
Anonymous says: Part of the reason IMVU can get away with all their bugs is because they’re in the entertainment business, so none of their users rely on them for anything really important.
Sorry, Anonymous, but I disagree. Those logos near the bottom of the page (a screenshot from the IMVU VIP Club subscription page) suggest that IMVU may ask me about things upon which I rely that are very important indeed.
Moreover, look at the Bugs and Testing page, and tell each one of the users complaining that their complaint is not important.
One last wrap-up coming…