Don't Shoot Me, I'm Only the Software 392
ctwxman writes "How often have you heard about some massive crash and then the blame was placed on the software? "Disasters are often blamed on bad software, but the cause is rarely bad programming." If you've been looking to blame your boss, this article from MSNBC says your ship has come in! Poor planning, poor execution and poor leadership are more likely to blame than bad code when it comes to systems that fail. "
Irony (Score:3, Funny)
Although legitimate in the concept, I would say that poor programming is most definitely a cause for system failures.
Re:Irony (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Irony (Score:5, Interesting)
Case in point, MS Windows. I actually read a book on programming security from the head of security at Microsoft(yeah, laugh all you want), and it gave some interesting insight to the corprate culture at Microsoft. The talking heads at the top want a shitload of features, and they want it by an unrealistic deadline(which, with the exception of longhorn, they almost always meet), and security gets pushed to the back, and maybe only added in as an afterthought.
Contrary to popular belief here on
I think Linux main security advantage lies not in that almost anyone in the world can look at the code(though that helps) it's that there is no "mono culture", you get a lot of interesting ideas contributed to the kernel, some are good, some not so good. Eventually the bad ideas fade away and you are left with a very solid operating system.
MS employees (Score:5, Insightful)
Amen to that. I don't know where this idea that MS doesn't hire skilled people to design and develop software came from, but it's wrong.
It has always appeared to me that MS hires top students from the very best schools.
bhj
Re:MS employees (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:MS employees (Score:5, Insightful)
It has always appeared to me that MS hires top students from the very best schools.
That's not a Good Thing. Very few 21-year-olds, even those who got the best grades at the best schools, understand software design or business process well enough for a major company to be able to rely on them.
Real-world experience is an important factors in successful design, and it's something that can't be taught in a school.
As smart as each new class of new direct-from-school hires might be (and I've known several, and they were all brilliant), Microsoft would probably generate higher-quality software if they hired 35-year-olds with a dozen years of experience at other successful software companies instead. Of course, it's going to be harder to find 35-year-olds willing to work 60-hour weeks in return for $45 grand, a free bike, and all the soda they can drink...
Re:MS employees (Score:5, Interesting)
I seem to recall a study, by IBM possibly, into how much young developers really contribute to software projects. The conclusion was that most of the young starters (up to age 25 IIRC) were only good for writing docs and possibly testing. You shouldn't let them near the code, because in the balance of probability, they will be counter-productive overall. Those up to age 30 were found to handle development on a single, focussed project usefully, but no more than that. Those over 30 could handle working on multiple areas at once competently.
Those figures are all from memory, but I'm pretty sure they're close. They're also a pretty damning indictment of the age discrimination that is rampant in the software development industry, and a fairly compelling explanation for why so many projects fail after the management choose to hire youngsters because they're cheap and willing to do whatever to advance their careers...
Re:MS employees - Not only MS! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:MS employees (Score:3, Informative)
Several of my friends spent their co-op terms at Microsoft, starting out in testing, moving up to code monkey, and by the time they graduated and we
Open your eyes (Score:5, Insightful)
It has always appeared to me that MS hires top students from the very best schools.
That is true--unfortunately they have been known to hire them AWAY from the best schools too (ie. before they graduate). It doesn't matter if they are top five percentile students--if they have zero practical experience and are thrown into a situation beyond their capabilities the result can be less than ideal. Nonetheless, I think that by now MS has figured out how to select and place recent grads and students hired before graduation. I think the problem is now deeper than that.
Microsoft triumphed over other tech companies that were prominent in its early days because BillG learned it had to become a marketing company (the same reason Apple still exists today--Jobs knew that from the start and Gates is a very quick study). Other tech companies remained software companies--they toiled away to make their next killer app the best it could be and marketing was an afterthought.
At Microsoft, from 1980 on at least, has been a marketing comapny first, with software development second. The most important technology it markets was invented elsewhere and merely extended by Microsoft. Only in the company's latter life have they been truly serious about research. The long time "thinkers" are brilliant but historically little has come out of Microsoft's research that has been commercially successful given the potential funding power MS has had.
Therein lies the problem. The article is right--software isn't the root cause of the vast majority of failures (even when the failure is the direct result of a software bug). At Microsoft, software design is driven by marketing--time deadlines, customer requests for features, backwards compatibility/legacy support etc. The result is the house of cards we build our systems upon today.
That result is unavoidable without EXTREMELY skilled planning and throttling the pace of change. Unfortunately, The MS Ship sails where the winds take it, and the pace of change has been rapid and relentless until now. I once thought the problems with MS products were because too many drop-outs were running the show. After seeing this blog [asp.net] I can see what the development teams have had to cope with. They have to do the impossible and try to get it done before the deadline slips yet again and MS market cap slips a few million and BillG comes down to yell at them. In some cases you have to be brilliant just to survive at MS.
So anyways, I think software bus are the immediate cause of a lot of disasters, but the ROOT cause definitely is poor planning and project management that leads to unstable system development.
Re:Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to every single software project ever.
Re:Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not every software project. The typical deadline for open source software is "when it's ready". Which often isn't an unrealistic deadline. However, the shitload-of-features problem can happen there, too (and is usually the main reason if "when it's ready" gets unrealistic).
Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)
Nowadays there's no revenue from quick
Re:Mod parent up (Score:3, Interesting)
It really does depend on the development team and their management. In many places, you're certainly correct, but plenty of commercial software houses do take pride in their work and/or realise that producing a well-
Re:Irony (Score:3, Funny)
"Damn it Bill, I'm a programmer, not a miracle worker!"
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Re:Irony (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
good software engineering is required for large systems. when you are developing hundred thousand lines of code to million lines of code. no amount of good programming will guarrante a good system without solid software engineering processes.
Re:Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
If the builders get given a plan where the roof is placed underneath the house, they should question it, not just build it blindly without asking.
Daniel
Duh. (Score:2, Interesting)
However, it seems to me that bad programming gives rise to buffer overflows and the like. These are more serious harms because they lead to the exploits. If you programmed well, you'd have a crappy program that would simply suck.
Re:Irony (Score:5, Interesting)
The genesis of the problem was the transition in 2001 by Harris Corp. of the Federal Aviation Administration's Voice Switching Control System from Unix-based servers to Microsoft Corp.'s off-the-shelf Windows Advanced Server 2000.
they violated the golden rule: dont touch the system if its working. and they were punished
wtf? the new system, designed to replace old one, was incapable to deal with data load? why would they "upgrade" it anyway?
Not really Irony (Score:2, Interesting)
Buck Passers (Score:5, Informative)
I think this little gem [dilbert.com] says it all. Strangely enough, it's today's Dilbert. Thing is, the buck-passers are who protect their own image or the image of those who write their cheques. The result? Too many projects are blamed on interns or programmers, rather than the truth coming to light.
Why? I think it's simple, really. Management often has no clue what they are doing in terms of managing a technical project so they make decisions about things like the exact features, and they often fight to get things a certain way -- unwittingly forcing programmers to code all the way around the block to get to the house next door, leaving problems in the wake.
The best case is when a programmer is given design autonomy. That's why Open Source is such a threat to large companies like Microsoft... because the guys who know what *can* be done, are the same guys doing it -- the result is 1111x better, and cheaper too.
I am so lucky to be working now for a company that allows me to have full autonomy with my projects. They tell me what the customer wants and I do it the way I think is best. Every single project done in this manner has resulted with happy customers and excellent systems.
Re:Buck Passers (Score:3, Interesting)
While I agree with you in principle and acknowledge that stupid managers are
Fuck - isnt it time we stood up and just told the truth - or are we all too scared of being out
Re:Buck Passers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Buck Passers (Score:4, Interesting)
That does seem to be the case at I company I consult for. As a part of an assessment, we received several unsolicited comments that they would be resistant to changing the way they performed development because the business customer was free to outsource. And it's happened on a few projects when the development team pushed back on timelines and requirements.
As a result, the development staff here lies to their managers, who lie to their directors, who lie to their VP's and on up the line. This points to a breakdown in communication between all levels in IT including the lines between IT and the business.
Re:Buck Passers (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not something unique to IT -- it's something fundamental to any command structure which relies on communication between unequals.
It's only common name is the SNAFU Principle [jargon.net], which was coined by Robert Anton Wilson (there's a very good discussion of it in his book Prometheus Rising).
In Illuminatus!, a satirical study of social pathologies, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea brought out an important principal that causes trouble in hierarchies: the Snafu Principle. People tend to say what they think the boss wants to hear, especially if they have noticed that the practice of ``shooting the messenger'' is common. This means that the information passed up the pyramid is distorted at each level. Thus, each higher layer of managers tends to have less and less contact with reality, and near the top they are often completely out of touch.
Re:Buck Passers (Score:3, Insightful)
The other problem is is that this type of 'message modification' can be done unconciously, from choice of words and adjectives, 'forgetting' to mention bad news, and even body language. Even subtle moderations can have an impact in a large heirachy.
It *is* possible to fight this, but what you then have to do is have a manager and the people they manage feel and act like equals. If there is no fear of reprisals for bad news, and no fear of reprisals for honest mistakes, then the quality of the communicati
Re:Buck Passers (Score:3, Interesting)
I was somewhat enlightened years ago by the suggestion to
Re:Buck Passers (Score:5, Interesting)
They fucked it up so horribly and it cost so much money that in the end they threw up their hands, wrote off about a million dollars worth of expenses and developed the app internally.
The internal developers (several of which were Indian might I add) finished the app on schedule.
Our company then passed an internal policy that we would insource (bring programmers in to work on a project) but that outsourcing was out of the question.
Re:Buck Passers (Score:4, Interesting)
Our company then passed an internal policy that we would insource (bring programmers in to work on a project) but that outsourcing was out of the question.
But this is also a problem. I've had so many managers who took the approach 'well, it didn't work once so it is now policy that we never, ever do it again' that it ends up biting you in the ass.
My last manager (I quit 2 weeks ago, yay me!) decided that software unit testing was fundamentally bad, because he'd tried to manage a project using XP (eXtreme Programming, not.. oh you know) and that uses unit testing and it didn't work very well. It became policy that we should never do unit testing. I kid you not.
Creating a policy to never do something that didn't work the first time is as bad as not trying it in the first place.
Re:Buck Passers (Score:5, Insightful)
Programers, at least the good ones, know how to say this, and say it loud and often. Likewise, the true professional salesmen who have actually studied their craft know how to say "This promotional technique of yours has actually been proven in study after study to be a pointless waste of time." The cabinet builder knows how to say, "That joint will fail." The day laborer knows how to say "If you really insist I do it that way you'll get less real work per day out of me and I'll be out on comp in six months."
Managment knows how to say, "I'm sorry, but our policy is. . . "
They're often very good at saying it, because they get a lot of practice saying it, instead of practicing how to listen to the people they've hired because they possess certain special skills and knowledge.
Engineers know how to say, "The Space Shuttle will blow up if you launch below a certain temperature."
It turns out they were right, but managment followed policy.
Managment's solution? Fire the engineers for speaking out.
So long as you work for managment that views its role as telling you what to do, and your role to just shut up and do it, actually doing your job the way you percieve it as an expert is simply a short walk to the unemployment line.
Once upon a time my mother was the manager of vehcile registration renewal for the NYS DMV. Her superior walked into her division one day and found her cleaning a microwave oven.
"Do you think we pay people at your grade level to clean ovens?" he asked her.
"Everyone of my people is working on production, in the only profit making division of the state government. Do you want me to stop one of my people from making money for the state just to clean an oven when I've really got nothing better to do right now myself?"
Fortunately for her, after a moment of reflection, he actually got it and replied, "You know, I never thought of it that way before. I guess sometimes we do pay people at your grade level to clean ovens."
Both he and my mom are fairly rare examples of managment. Managment serves the purpose of making sure the secretary has paper clips when he needs them, the assembly line workers have bolts when they need them, and to gently nudge people back on course if they should happen to stray a bit from the path, not "tell them what to do."
But somebody has negelected to tell most of the managers that.
KFG
Re:Buck Passers (Score:2)
Progammers (me and 5 other people) were found to have complied with the requirements and the software worked. We were not to blame. A bad customer (an internal customer who had not undertaken web development before, you guessed it a Marketing department trying to cash in on the dot-com boom!) was found to be the culprit with ever changing requirements and
Why does he have an aussie accent? (Score:2)
MSNBC report that is isn't the softwares fault, but the person who wrote the software... erm... so this is Microsoft trying to make the masses docile again.
It isn't windows fault that it crashes, but erm, our, because, erm, we have poor planning, poor execution and poor leadership. But our
Re:Why does he have an aussie accent? (Score:2)
why do I bother?
Re:Buck Passers - Works Both Ways (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry boss, you're getting paid to know. Spend some time (gasp! outside of work if you need to) and read up. While you're not expected to know every last implementation detail, you should understand the capabilities of your chosen platforms completely.
Re:nobody yet knows how to design software (Score:4, Insightful)
No they don't. It's been studied for decades, but in all that time we've still not settled on anything that's actually demonstrated over long periods of time to be good. Hardware, materials and other available resources are continuously evolving and changing, meaning that software design research has nothing to reliably settle on before things change again.
We don't even have consistent and proven programming languages. Today it's Java, C#, VB and a variety of imperative scripting languages. Yesterday it was C and C++, before that it was Fortran, and before that there have been variants of assembler. And as we use these languages, we're constantly discovering more and more about language design and developing new languages.
HCI is still in very early stages of development, and that's a major part of software engineering. (If people can't use software then what's the point?) The vast majority of software development shops -- particularly smaller ones -- don't even employ HCI experts, and substantial proportions of developers still don't respect them or understand what the point is.
Something like bridge building, for instance, has been studied for centuries (if not millenia). It relies on consistent physics, consistent tools and well understood environments. Organisations that build bridges have well established experience, procedures and regulations that are put in place throughout their organisation. Software development's been studied for a few decades with the existing materials, resources and expectations constantly changed from underneath it.
Organisations that build software still don't have any reasonable idea of how to arrange themselves, or what procedures they should be using. There have certainly been some pretty good ideas from relatively recent ongoing studies, but the fact that managers and developers and marketers and whoever else frequently don't gel together very well with usually bad results is just an ongoing consequence of the fact that it's a very new field.
Just because software engineering has been studied for a few decades doesn't mean we know what we're talking about, or even that we know what we're studying.
D*mnd if you do and D*mnd if you dont (Score:4, Interesting)
Now there's a mathematical formula (let me see if I can derive one) for each level you go down, the half-life of bad software divided by the software engineer goes up a log base 10 (4 - 95%, 3 - 90%, 2 - 75%, 1 - 50%, 0 - 25%, -1 10%, -2 - 2%, -3 -
Re:D*mnd if you do and D*mnd if you dont (Score:3, Insightful)
I have done CMMI and I am not a fan of heavy process done in the heavy handed way CMMI is done. Its a great way for extra levels of management to justify themselvs. That much said, CMMI does ask developers to do important things (and don't quote me, this is just what it means to me):
1. Coding standards
2. Unit testing (automate it!)
3. Peer reviews
4. System testing
CMMI makes you do all of that and document it. The paperwork is over the top
Also... (Score:2, Insightful)
As I recall, it also came from a tech who didn't do his job right in rebooting the machine that handled the software.
You can't always blame software; you have to blame the end-users too.
Re:Also... (Score:3, Informative)
Now of course you are right that some admin forgot the fortnightly reboot and that led to the problems, but I simply can't totally dispute the notion that a server OS that has to be regularly rebooted should at least take a share of the blame.
Re:Also... (Score:2, Insightful)
So in other words the life of airplane passengers is depending on the fact if a computer is rebooted manually or not. Thank god nothing really bad happened during this radio outage, otherwise some smartass would have blamed it on the tech that forgot to reboot.
The main problem is obviously we're relying on systems and procedures that never have been tested under emergency conditions.
Re:Also... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your analogy is crap (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't about a standard maintenance procedure, since a server should not have to be rebooted constantly in order to maintain. stability/functionality. That's like saying it's ok to swap the
Re:Also... (Score:2)
Summary of article (Score:3, Insightful)
Big projects require organization or shit happens.
Uh, that's it. Thrilled?
And the net/net is... (Score:2)
Great.
Re:And the net/net is...A N D (Score:4, Funny)
We need to hire MORE managers.
mm (Score:3, Interesting)
There may be minor flaws in things that an application relies on i.e. external code libraries or methodologies which have not been proven and tested.
Speaking of tested, how many coders here can testify that they are great programmers, but so many times have not been given appropriate amounts of time or resources to write something that works perfect.
That to me is not bad programming, because many times under these situations programmers do an amazing job of writing amazing code which actually works for the most part.
There's too many managers out there who like things to work 90% and say that the other 10% (which usually ends up being crucial to end users) can be dealt with after the initial release.
Management vs. Intelligence (Score:4, Insightful)
Management skated, two programmers fired.
That's why I raise cattle and write hunting articles these days.
Bullshit! (Score:5, Interesting)
Last month, a system that controls communications between commercial jets and air traffic controllers in southern California shut off because some maintenance had not been performed.
As I recall, the system in question has to be rebooted every thirty days, which is a software problem! The very fact that there were ridiculous procedures to fail to carry out is due to the poor software in the first place.
Re:Bullshit! (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think so.
Mission-critical? (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying you need regular reboots is the same as saying you need a firewall to protect against viruses: both show flaws in the design of OS.
And as far as "fscking their disks every day" goes, that's more sloppy design. You shouldn't have to do that. Fsck fixes file system errors resulting from poor application behavior, environmental problems, and (sometimes) hardware troubles. You shouldn't have those every day in mission-critical systems, but even if you do then putting in place a system of daily fsck is not the way to fix it.
I've had a production application server running for the last 288 days. It's due to come down for OS updates, but it will do so on my schedule, not because its operating system is poorly designed.
Still poor planning (Score:2)
If I make some application that's never intended to be used in a mission-critical, always-on setting, is it my fault if some administrator decides to use it for that purpose, with disastrous results?
Re:Bullshit! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bullshit! (Score:3, Insightful)
Constraints (Score:5, Insightful)
Software projects seem to be primarily constrained by time/money which is usually controlled by management (read: boss)
If one wants to test software properly then you will need lots of the constraints (i.e. time and/or money). Just before a coder is testing his block, he/she will generally say something like:
"I'm finished the block, just need to test it a bit more"
Generally that is not what management will hear, they hear:
"I'm finished"
So they think "its ready". I've seen several first generation projects get hit by this problem (in commercial environments). In the IC design world (where its not generally possible to just flash the firmware to fix a bug) its accepted that at this point - i.e. primary design is finished you are only 50% of the way through. We spend at least half the time verifying the blocks. Management in IC design have accepted that this just as important as the implementation and so don't go off making wild assumptions.
So rather than just pawn off the blame onto your boss, it really is (partially anyway) your fault as well for not highlighting the fact that your block is not as tested as you would like it to be.
The philosophy of open source seems to limit the "its ready" effect to a good degree and hence the better code quality perception. When main stream commercial coding picks up the slack, it should get better as well. But generally a lot of these messes can be attributed to communication (person to person) failure rather than coder/boss failures.
It's really amazing... (Score:2, Interesting)
how many large companies think that they can still be successful by programming their way out of problems.
If you work at a company that places some value on requirements and design development before you start cranking out code, consider yourself fortunate. And for those of you that have a consistent process for development and deployment, you're not that common either. There are still a considerable number of large companies with a presence on the web that rely on individual heriocs to keep their busin
Father of VMS and winNT (Score:2)
Poor? (Score:2)
... OR made by Microsoft. How Windows.* fails and/or is insecure deserves a new whole category for it.
Well, after all, was that company that started the culture that if software fails is something normal and just reboot, and popular culture attributes the problem to the software.
In the other hand, we use to think that software in Linux is so reliable (well, at least Linux itself) than if something fails, must be users or hardware fault, while that is no
Fuck You Microsoft-NBC! (Score:2, Interesting)
The fact that YOUR SOFTWARE shuts down after 49.7 days "to prevent data overload" is YOUR FAULT and BAD SOFTWARE DESIGN, no matter how much you use your pet news outlet to spin otherwise.
You're right about one thing, though. The FAA guys were idiots for deploying your software to replace an (eminently more reliable by all accounts) UNIX-based system. Call it a compound failure.
-Isaac
Re:Fuck You Microsoft-NBC! (Score:5, Informative)
The 49.7 days refers to stuff that is not based on Windows NT. IE Nothing to do with the system deployed that was Windows 2000. Second, the versions of Windows that are built this way do not require rebooting at this period, an internal timer turns over and the system continues on as normal. The programmer who designed the system for the FAA msut not have RTFM or designed it very poorly to require this.
M$NBC says $oftware is Good! Blame the user. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry Microsoft, it's the software. When I go to the local airport and see a kiosk displaying a Windoze 2000 screen saver instead of information, something is wrong with the software running the kiosk. I'm sure that the kiosk owner followed all of the directions given and the stupid thing did not work anyway. A box that has to be restarted once a month and crashes when it's not has a software problem. Having two of them will simply multiply the problem by a factor of two.
How am I so sure that software not people are to blame? It's easy, I started using non Microsoft software and most of my problems went away. I've got the same old hardware, it just works better under Linux. It does more for me too.
Why is that? It might be that there's no nasty registry that's designed to keep me from "stealing" software. It might be that sane networking models really do eliminate most problems with worms and viruses. It might be that free software really works to make better code. Who cares?
The bottom line is obvious. No amount of blame shifting will change it.
Re:M$NBC says $oftware is Good! Blame the user. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you build an entire campaign around "you know who to blame when things go wrong" then you can't whine when people take you up on it.
It _might_ be the code. (Score:2)
Segmentation fault
"Damn you, management!"
From the article (Score:2)
Such disasters are often blamed on bad software, but the cause is rarely bad programming. As systems grow more complicated, failures instead have far less technical explanations: bad management, communication or training.
Really? So the buffer overflows, et al occur because people are not properly trained? I believe the buffer overflow is one of the more prevalent causes of vulnerabilities. The SANS Top 20 list [sans.org] text contains 24 instances of the word 'overflow'. Hmmm.
"In 90 percent of the cases, i
Hrm...Theres a problem here. (Score:3, Informative)
However, I do take issue with the following quote:
"Another common theme in failures lies in the ranks of employees who actually must use the systems. Often they're not given proper training. There's also a chance that they don't want the project to succeed, especially if they see it as a threat to employment."
Never give the credit so quickly to evil intent if you can chalk it up to simple laziness instead. I doubt many employees conciously try to cause software crashes, in comparison with the number who just dont have a clue what they're doing.
And, naturally, programmer error will always cause a certain amount of crashes...we are human too. Testings just a way of minimizing that.
One of the biggest problems (Score:4, Insightful)
And coders cannot be designers, DBAs, or possess much business knowledge. Interaction with the end user is done with a 'business designer'.
As with the childhood game of post office, some of the information gets lost for every node in the SLCD (sftwr life-cycle design) chain.
One of the best fixes is to allow direct interaction of coder/end-user, and merge the designer/developer roles for a better industry understanding.
Re:One of the biggest problems (Score:2)
I believe every programmer should know at least a low level language C, C++ or Asm.
A dynamic language like Perl, Python or Ruby.
Our modern cobols, Java or
A functional language, Haskell, ML or even Lisp...
I have never met a programmer who knows at least 1 of each from those categories who is a bad programmer. But I rarely trust programmers who can't code in more than one or two languages.
Re:One of the biggest problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:One of the biggest problems (Score:3, Interesting)
You've hit the nail on the head, thought I didn't realize it until I read your comment. The HARD part of programming is dealing with the people. Everything else can be understood logically, which is easy, but dealing with people is an irrational process. Anyone can find the square root of 8 (ie write code) but not everyone can find the square root of an apple (dealing with people).
Biased View? (Score:5, Interesting)
Translation: they didn't hire enough analysts
Translation: They didn't hire enough consultants from SAP.
"Developers are least qualified to validate a business requirement. They're either nerds and don't get it, or they're people in another culture altogether," said Michelsen,...
Translation: It's not our fault the developers couldn't understand our brick of a business case.
Another common theme in failures lies in the ranks of employees who actually must use the systems.
Translation: It's not our fault the interface sucks - it's the stupid users too dumb to adapt to our software.
Dilbert remains a documentary (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to think this. Then I realized that at least the developers knew one end of it -- they knew what the software can do. The other end, what the customer wants out of the system, is usually not known by anyone. Not management, certainly not sales, and not the customer either.
A customer with an existing system will often try to write requirements which amount to "do exactly what the existing system does in exactly the way it does it", which is not what they want or they wouldn't be replacing the system. Or, whoever is providing the business requirements will be so out of touch with their own business that the requirements will be incomplete or wrong. Or on the flip side they'll be so familiar with the system that they'll leave out things which are obvious to them -- but so obscure outside their field that no one on the software side will even notice the omission.
Of course, these problems will be discovered very late in the development cycle, resulting in a scramble to redesign and redevelop, a bunch of fingerpointing, mandatory overtime, and a host of other ills all of which lead to bad and buggy software.
Re:Dilbert remains a documentary (Score:3, Insightful)
So this bluescreen of death... (Score:4, Funny)
I don't know about you... (Score:2)
Link to NIST study (Score:3, Informative)
I've bitched about this before, but why can't news sites provide links to their sources? This is the internet, after all; we have the technology. It would take seconds, and obviously the journalist already has the information. Yes, I know I can search it myself, but I shouldn't have to - the supporting documentation should be provided by the person writing the article. (And, yes, I'm aware of the irony of saying that without providing a link. :) But I'm stating an opinion, not a fact.)
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/n02-1--RJ
Of course! (Score:2)
Suppose I worked at a store where the use a cheap PC based POS ( Point of Sale, not Piece of Shit ) system that uses basic networking, a central database and the basics POS stuff with electronic payments handled externally. Sounds decent you say? The central database was an MS Access 2000 database, the basic networking meant that every cash register would have to use Remote Desk
Snippet on blaming the developers (Score:5, Insightful)
Not surprsing that a CEO would make this remark. I can't count the times I've asked the business community I'm working with for clarification of a business rule or requirement, and then get a 'sigh' or other look that says - "I'm too busy to worry about this".
And on the contract I'm working on now, they consider a 30 min phone meeting enough information to build a full blown app - trying to get documentation is like pulling teeth. And of course we know where the finger will be pointed if there's any issues.
To say we're nerds who don't "get it" is just an asinine, condescending remark; a) I'm perfectable able to learn about the business involved, b) If you explain the rules properly most developers I know have no problem at all coding the solution. I find most of the developers I work with brighter than the business community they're working with. The CEOs remark has a dilbert-like quality to it imo, and this guy's one of the 'experts' on the problem in the article... ha!
Re:Snippet on blaming the developers (Score:3, Interesting)
Being a junior developer is irrelevant your problem - if you have a good PM, hs/she should be willing to go to bat for your team, and demand functional and technical specs as needed. If not the project will be in jeopardy. If the PM does ask for requirements and doesn't get them, at least it
Re:Snippet on blaming the developers (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with you than in an ideal world you could go to management of some sort and get the situation fixed. But in my experience, esp as a contractor, it's usually an uphill battle not worth fighting if it's problem with the company's culture.
If the culture is screwed up, I politely decline a contract extension when the time comes. My job
Business Process Broken (Score:3, Interesting)
- software projects are usually done in concert with business process changes,
- business process changes are often poorly managed, and
- the resulting problems are usually not due to software implementation issues
In other words, if you want your software projects to succeed, recognize that the management and executives are where a company's resources should be concentrated. The programmers are usually unimportant to the success of a project, and businesses can safely spend fewer resources on them without negatively affecting most projects.Also Reported In... (Score:2, Interesting)
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette [post-gazette.com] has a closely related story: Software disasters are often people problems [post-gazette.com]. Well, duh: "Garbage in; garbage out."
What I find really interesting is that this story, or various versions of it, while hardly "new," starts popping up on news sites all at once? It sounds like some organization is running a PR campaign, but it isn't quite astroturfing [catb.org].
Re:Also Reported In... (Score:2)
Lack of IT management training (Score:2)
All too often, an IT manager is a programmer whose technical skills were weak or out of date, and so got pushed into middle managment. They then are responsible for making decisions that affect the success of the project. All without any additional training on how to be a manager. It's a situation just waiting for the Peter Principle [wikipedia.org] to kick in.
Everyone agrees that managing programmers is like herding cats,
Nevertheless... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nevertheless, it's those poor planners, poor executors, and poor leaders who are in charge. You really think they are going to take the blame? No, of course not! It's so much easier, more fun, and better for your career to tell upper management that it was just the programmers who couldn't follow their instructions correctly.
Programmers will then get blamed, the poor managers will get a bonus for "correctly" identifying the problem, and corporate America will sail on as it always has: giving the big bucks to the managers and sales folks, while ignoring the programmers.
Who me, bitter?
time to marked, deadlines and rushed projects (Score:5, Interesting)
I have, time and again, been asked to cut corners in the design during the implementation phase of a project. The result is, that too much is cut in order to meet the deadline, another project sucks out key resources after the deadline and the product is rushed into production.
Everybody is happy until things start falling apart
44% of the employees (a couple of hundred) in my department are consultants , employed on a timelimeted contract. Some slam things together knowing they are not present when "patch time" starts
Bad testing, bad deadlines and rushed projects is the cause of a lot of evil!
Luckily, I can still express myself in the cvs comments and the random comments in the code
Speaking as a senior software test goon . . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Last month, a system that controls communications between commercial jets and air traffic controllers in southern California shut off because some maintenance had not been performed.
Yeah. That maintenance they failed to perform? It was their mandated once-a-month reboot of their windows system, because it locks up after 43 days.
This was the result of bad programming.
Anyway, as a QA guy, I can assure you that bad programming abounds. It's my job to make sure you never see it. Part of that job is trying to drill into programmer's heads the concept that performing to spec when used as directed is not sufficient.
Article is basicly right (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm... I wonder if the execs running nuclear power plants have finished installing windows to run them....
Better yet, we can put windows in charge of the ICBM fire control systems. We'll be *so* state of the industry.
I hate smoking software problems (Score:3, Funny)
%^$#@& SOFTWARE!!!!
UI and errors (Score:4, Funny)
In the generic sense, it would start with "Could not do xyz. Please check what you intended to do and try again."
Then, it would progress through "I can't do that. Try again." "You're starting to wear on my nerves. Can't you do anything right?"
Then, it would start to get more down to the source of the problem, beginning with "DOES NOT COMPUTE" and ending, finally, with "You fucking moron, my program works, read the manual before i cut you."
Stupid users always bothering me with [rottentomatoes.com] crap [rottentomatoes.com].
Customers & managers (Score:5, Interesting)
In India, software companies treat the customer as God accepting his/her unreasonable targets.. I wouldnt blame the customers alone for it... the managers too are responsible. They agree to whatever the customer says even though the actual development team asks them not to. And then, the normal work timings stretch to 10 AM to 3-4 AM next day... Now, anybody think anyone can write quality code when they are working this timing??
Well, the only advantage that comes here is that we get to read all the
Here it comes.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, now that I think about it, that's probably closer to the truth than anything else...
blame the users (Score:3, Interesting)
There was then supposedly a program crash and magically the message went out.
I was of course blamed because as the network admin I somehow failed by being unable to bring back all of those e-mails, even though there are a million things wrong with that train of thought.
Clearly they couldn't imagine that:
1) software crashes don't cause mail to send
2) why was she removing names from a group instead of selectively adding them
3) she didn't use the software correctly on multiple counts
4) if she is clearly not competent enough to handle this and it was such an important e-mail, why was she given the task and not someone higher up?
In the end, yet one more reason I hate my job.
So it's the Hardware then... (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming all my hardware is behaving nicely if a crash occurs that means a piece of software somewhere has failed, be it OS, network or what have you.
Too many suits who haven't read F.P. Brooks (Score:5, Insightful)
Programmers vs. Managers (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're programming with other programmers, you are operating in an environment that has constraints built in. You are constrained by the quality of your teammates, by the amount of time available, by the list of desired features, and so on.
Now imagine that managers are faced with constraints. They have to deal with the insane deadlines imposed on them by the O-level people in the company. Middle managers in particular are often in a very unenviable position, in that they have to try to make impossible demands possible. But just as there are varying levels of programming skill, there are varying levels of management skill. Some managers can push back on their bosses enough to give the project a chance of succeeding, but many are ill-equipped to do so.
Those that are ill-equipped to do so are in this position primarily because unlike the field of programming, where specialized education is seen as a necessary prerequisite to employment (i.e. - "He's got a bachelor's in Computer Science from MIT, we'll hire him") most managers either have no specialized management training, or they have an MBA (a degree that sometimes offers real management training but often provides no practical hands-on management training at all), or even worse, they've been in the same company or types of companies for years, learning the same bad management habits over and over.
What businesses need to do is pay more attention to actual real-world leadership experience and training. "Manager" is a term that reeks of 19th Century automated factories. When you're dealing with abstract concepts, creativity, and continually-shifting requirements, you need to have leadership skills.
You also need to have people skills, and while it's easy to berate salespeople and managers because they often seem defined by their "touchy-feely" capabilities, the flip side is that without those abilities, it's very very difficult to lead people.
278 Million Dollars later it gets cancelled (Score:5, Interesting)
At the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, some of the payroll systems date back to 1964 (that's right - no joke, they were bought when Lyndon Johnson was President), so they decided to replace them with a new system based on Oracle Financials. The new system is called CoreFLS. It has been a fiasco [informationweek.com]. So far VA has already spent over $270 Million out of an expected $472 Million total budget for the project. The project has been a failure laregly because of mis-management and plain-old stupidity.
First, they decided to do test trials at one of the busiest hospitals (that's right, they first went live at one of the *BUSIEST* hospitals) instead of a smaller test location. The user training for a critical system consisted of a self-paced web-based distance training as detailed here [sptimes.com]. No hands-on training was provided until a month after deployment and only after problems were apparent because the whole operation ground to a halt. So finally the senior managment decide to commission a $500,000 study from Carnegie Mellon to find out why it failed. The study concluded that CoreFLS was "an exemplary case study in how not to do technology transition." Yeah, they needed to spend a half-million to find the obvious.
Finally Congress got involved and all the senior managers including the Secretary himself were put on the "hot-seat" to testify. Lots of heads rolled (even senior managers like Assistant Secretaries) and lots of people were forced to resign or were fired. Now the place is crawling with federal investigators looking to put people in jail
So now the project gets cancelled. The sad thing is that VA really needed this program to succeed. I suspect that the technology has been made a scapegoat for mismanagement (not that the technology was perfect). Well.. back to 1964.
True that (Score:2)