Why Software Builds Fail

itwbennett writes: A group of researchers from Google, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the University of Nebraska undertook a study of over 26 million builds by 18,000 Google engineers from November 2012 through July 2013 to better understand what causes software builds to fail and, by extension, to improve developer productivity. And, while Google isn't representative of every developer everywhere, there are a few findings that stand out: Build frequency and developer (in)experience don't affect failure rates, most build errors are dependency-related, and C++ generates more build errors than Java (but they're easier to fix).

Comments

Re:It's usually a computer problem

[frank_adrian314159]

Please, give up the C++ slander.

Why? It deserves it. And I speak as one who has been using it since cfront 1.0 and used it for 15 years or so professionally. Basically, its two reasons to exist - its performance and its small (-ish) runtime library are dwindling in importance. You can now get as good performance writing C primitives in a decent high-level languages. And RT minimalism has only been an issue in the embedded world for the last 20 years or so.

Yes, it was once the mainstay of the engineering software world. Let it go and let it drift away to its end as the COBOL of the embedded world.

Re:It's usually a computer problem

[geekoid]

c++ is great. I'm sorry you're not very good and never mastered it, but that isn't the languages problem.