[Nottingham] [Misc] 23/04/2020 follow-on and 14/05/2020 discussion thoughts

[Martin]

On 15/05/2020 08:32, J J wrote:
> The rapidly dwindling sanity of Valve programmers as expressed through
> code comments
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k238XpMMn38
> 
> J.

Looks like a desperate overnight hack to get something to show for a
next morning demo...!

Thanks for that giggle :-)


Scarily, how much more of that type of stuff is rushed out for the sake
of arbitrary deadlines from desperate greedy management and the
time-for-coding and testing be damned?...

Yep, seen too much of that.


In stark contrast, in the long ago past, I did see a beautiful example
where a 'must work first time' system was put together where the system
had planned-in design for test from the outset. Separately, test code
was written to exercise the entire system section-by-section and finally
fully end-to-end. Importantly, the tests were blindly written from the
/design spec/ .

I got a complaint from the dept manager as to why that job 'looked
bigger'...

True enough, the job went through to product first time and saved
(avoided) a few weeks of (difficult, expensive,) post-product 'iteration'.

An unexpected positive side effect was that the /design spec itself/ was
in effect debugged by the aspect of having the validation code written
blindly /from the spec/ ...


Some good fun that seems to be repeatedly forgotten or stupidly ignored.


Cheers,
Martin