The best way to avoid bugs is not to write them in the first place, but learning the degree of care and atention required is hard, and people will often (maybe instinctively) try to avoid this difficulty if they can. The root is psychology and complacency/laziness.
Sometimes it's not laziness on the coder's part, but rather pressure from above. Even when using the most efficient development methodologies, care and attention to detail still take time. Some coders just don't have the cojones needed to tell management, "it's not been sufficiently tested yet, so you'll have to wait" and let themselves be pressured into releasing code that they know isn't ready.
It also requires the tester to have good communications skills as they may have to work to convince the development team that what they've found actually is a problem and being too antisocial or too introverted might not get problems corrected even if they are important and are discovered.
This is important. I generally take the attitude that the QA people aren't idiots, and I assume from the start that whatever they bring me is in fact a problem until I discover otherwise. If there's a disagreement on whether something is a bug or not, at least one of us isn't understanding the desired behavior and it's important to work through that until we find where the problem is, whether it's bad code, a bad test plan, or unclear requirements.
I can give a counter-idea: in my first job, I didn't have QA. It was up to me to make sure my own code was quality enough before releasing it, and that aspect terrified me enough that I did learn to write quality code (which basically means you are testing your own code thoroughly, doing your own QA).
I think it's always necessary to test your own code via unit tests and whatnot prior to letting someone else have at it, but I think it's also important to have that second set of eyes on it from a behavioral standpoint. Often we're too close to the code to really beat it up properly and subject it to really weird edge cases, and good QA people are quite adept at doing that. What I've found works pretty well is having the code go through QA, but still being held to some kind of personal accountability for it as well. Even if it's nothing more than your co-workers laughing at your QA bug reports and saying your code sucks, it's some more motivation to get it right the first time, and if it passes QA you have at least some degree of confidence that it works properly.
Another thing I've learned is that the stereotypical animosity between dev and QA is counterproductive. It's much better to think of them as two parts of a team working toward the same goal, and it's beneficial to foster an environment where the devs actively encourage QA to break stuff instead of trying to blow them off all the time.
Before judging, please, check out Gigster, try to ask real Gigster or users of Gigster, and see if we are as bad as you think.
Don't have to, I read the contract. It's a joke. I basically have to assume all of the risk if the customer isn't happy with the deliverable (regardless of what the requirements specified), and then if things get bad enough to go to court, I can't even do that - I have to submit to binding arbitration in a locality 3,000 miles away. On top of that, I have to agree to indemnify Gigster if the customer sues them over some code that I wrote.
People with security clearances aren't that difficult to come by, but having the clearance isn't the hard part. If you're going to be doing freelance work that requires a clearance, odds are your facility and security procedures are also going to have to be approved for the work, and that can get expensive. For some things, that may just mean a locking file cabinet. For others, it may mean you have to work in an air-gapped environment enclosed inside a Faraday cage and all deliverables have to be under two-man control anytime they're outside the facility, with signed logs documenting anytime anyone checked out code or touched the delivery media.
I had a clearance for many years, but none of the work I did would have been something I could have done at home or at my own office without spending thousands of dollars to make it suitable, not including the cost of periodic audits.
This goes back to SOPA, PIPPA and any other law about the Internet. Congressmen and Senators are typically students of law. They have little to no understanding of how technology works, yet they feel as if they can legislate it.
It's a real-life example of "if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". The law is that hammer.
Gun control helped to have 1.24 death by gun violence per 100 000 people in France and Germany compared to 10.5 in the US (figures 2010).
Bearing in mind of course, that 2/3rds of those 10.5 are suicides. What about the fact that the state of Vermont, with the most liberal gun laws in the country, had the lowest murder rate (1.1 per 100K) and the lowest firearm murder rate (0.3 per 100K) for the same period of time? Obviously the availability of guns didn't factor in there, nor did the permissive gun laws (or lack thereof). Why then is gun violence so much more prevalent in states like New York, Illinois, and California where the laws are substantially more strict? Why are there so many suicides nationwide? I don't think it's about the guns themselves - there are some serious social issues at play there, and addressing those will do far more to fix things than gun control will.
An F-150 isn't available as a $70,000 dually. An F-450, however, is, and has a towing capacity of more than 31,000 pounds. What was that about being full of shit?
Apples and oranges. When Tesla makes something that can pull a 30,000 pound trailer 400+ miles without stopping and can be back on the road 10 minutes after arriving at a Supercharger station, maybe it'll be comparable.
If you're going to do that, I highly recommend getting the VIN of the vehicle along with the plate number. My sister and I were in an accident many years ago where the kid driving had a fake license and temporary tags, neither of which could ID the vehicle or driver. Having the VIN was the only thing that enabled the police to find him a couple of weeks later.
I've been quite happy with my Mossberg 590A1. 18.5" barrel, 9-round magazine, and a Knoxx Spec-Ops stock. The Knoxx stock is amazing - I did a full 8-hour self-defense course with it and after about 600 rounds including 3" magnum slugs, my shoulder wasn't the least bit sore.
The other four impact sites weren't found right after the missions themselves as the summary says. They were also found by the LROC team, just more quickly because they had a better idea where to look for them. I noticed that as soon as I hit "Submit". Sorry guys, I fail at reading comprehension.
I use a VPS at Joe's Datacenter for offsite backups and other odds and ends and have been quite pleased with the service. $6/month, and they're very good about notices and status updates regarding system issues, upgrades, etc.
They're big and geeky looking, but the BlueParrott B250-XT has an awesome noise-cancelling mic. I can drive down the highway at 70mph with the windows down and the person at the other end won't hear a thing except me. The sound quality on my end is a little peaky, but otherwise it's been a pretty decent headset. Ridiculously long battery life too.
while this is true, it's perfectly legal to issue a subpoena or some other court order to collect evidence of a crime or a plan of future criminal activity.
That court order is called a "warrant". Subpoenas are also issued by the court or its officers, but only in conjunction with a pending court case. The main point is that the court issues both of those documents, not an executive agency under its own authority. Also, note that the Fourth Amendment covers "persons, houses, papers, and effects", not just "homes or property".
now go back to elementary school and maybe post those stupid meme's of the founders' quotes that are taken out of context
Probably not a good idea to impugn the education of another while conflating plurals and possessives in the same sentence. Yeah, I'm being a grammar Nazi on purpose, but that's just because you could have made your point in a civil manner.
You should probably do it while naked, cold, hungry, and being beaten every time a verbose compiler flags an error. You should learn to code as if your life depends on it. Except no substitutes!
*** SYNTAX ERROR LINE 3 - UNEXPECTED VERB "EXCEPT"
Slashdot Mirror
I could definitely handle the view of acres and acres of solar panels if I got free power.
And the Moon's total mass makes for an escape velocity of 2.38 kilometer per second.
"That's about 5200 mph to you and me, Russ."
Well, it's more important for legislation to have a snappy name than it is for it to actually be beneficial to the public. Geez, don't you get that?!
Yeah, I'm not bleeding for Populous. The game was good, but c'mon.
The developer had to fixed all the outstanding bugs for free, as management refused to payout their final milestone and bonus payments.
I'm surprised that's all that happened. I would have thought there would have been some legal consequences.
The best way to avoid bugs is not to write them in the first place, but learning the degree of care and atention required is hard, and people will often (maybe instinctively) try to avoid this difficulty if they can. The root is psychology and complacency/laziness.
Sometimes it's not laziness on the coder's part, but rather pressure from above. Even when using the most efficient development methodologies, care and attention to detail still take time. Some coders just don't have the cojones needed to tell management, "it's not been sufficiently tested yet, so you'll have to wait" and let themselves be pressured into releasing code that they know isn't ready.
It also requires the tester to have good communications skills as they may have to work to convince the development team that what they've found actually is a problem and being too antisocial or too introverted might not get problems corrected even if they are important and are discovered.
This is important. I generally take the attitude that the QA people aren't idiots, and I assume from the start that whatever they bring me is in fact a problem until I discover otherwise. If there's a disagreement on whether something is a bug or not, at least one of us isn't understanding the desired behavior and it's important to work through that until we find where the problem is, whether it's bad code, a bad test plan, or unclear requirements.
I can give a counter-idea: in my first job, I didn't have QA. It was up to me to make sure my own code was quality enough before releasing it, and that aspect terrified me enough that I did learn to write quality code (which basically means you are testing your own code thoroughly, doing your own QA).
I think it's always necessary to test your own code via unit tests and whatnot prior to letting someone else have at it, but I think it's also important to have that second set of eyes on it from a behavioral standpoint. Often we're too close to the code to really beat it up properly and subject it to really weird edge cases, and good QA people are quite adept at doing that. What I've found works pretty well is having the code go through QA, but still being held to some kind of personal accountability for it as well. Even if it's nothing more than your co-workers laughing at your QA bug reports and saying your code sucks, it's some more motivation to get it right the first time, and if it passes QA you have at least some degree of confidence that it works properly.
Another thing I've learned is that the stereotypical animosity between dev and QA is counterproductive. It's much better to think of them as two parts of a team working toward the same goal, and it's beneficial to foster an environment where the devs actively encourage QA to break stuff instead of trying to blow them off all the time.
Before judging, please, check out Gigster, try to ask real Gigster or users of Gigster, and see if we are as bad as you think.
Don't have to, I read the contract. It's a joke. I basically have to assume all of the risk if the customer isn't happy with the deliverable (regardless of what the requirements specified), and then if things get bad enough to go to court, I can't even do that - I have to submit to binding arbitration in a locality 3,000 miles away. On top of that, I have to agree to indemnify Gigster if the customer sues them over some code that I wrote.
No thanks.
People with security clearances aren't that difficult to come by, but having the clearance isn't the hard part. If you're going to be doing freelance work that requires a clearance, odds are your facility and security procedures are also going to have to be approved for the work, and that can get expensive. For some things, that may just mean a locking file cabinet. For others, it may mean you have to work in an air-gapped environment enclosed inside a Faraday cage and all deliverables have to be under two-man control anytime they're outside the facility, with signed logs documenting anytime anyone checked out code or touched the delivery media.
I had a clearance for many years, but none of the work I did would have been something I could have done at home or at my own office without spending thousands of dollars to make it suitable, not including the cost of periodic audits.
This goes back to SOPA, PIPPA and any other law about the Internet. Congressmen and Senators are typically students of law. They have little to no understanding of how technology works, yet they feel as if they can legislate it.
It's a real-life example of "if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". The law is that hammer.
Gun control helped to have 1.24 death by gun violence per 100 000 people in France and Germany compared to 10.5 in the US (figures 2010).
Bearing in mind of course, that 2/3rds of those 10.5 are suicides. What about the fact that the state of Vermont, with the most liberal gun laws in the country, had the lowest murder rate (1.1 per 100K) and the lowest firearm murder rate (0.3 per 100K) for the same period of time? Obviously the availability of guns didn't factor in there, nor did the permissive gun laws (or lack thereof). Why then is gun violence so much more prevalent in states like New York, Illinois, and California where the laws are substantially more strict? Why are there so many suicides nationwide? I don't think it's about the guns themselves - there are some serious social issues at play there, and addressing those will do far more to fix things than gun control will.
An F-150 isn't available as a $70,000 dually. An F-450, however, is, and has a towing capacity of more than 31,000 pounds. What was that about being full of shit?
Apples and oranges. When Tesla makes something that can pull a 30,000 pound trailer 400+ miles without stopping and can be back on the road 10 minutes after arriving at a Supercharger station, maybe it'll be comparable.
If you're going to do that, I highly recommend getting the VIN of the vehicle along with the plate number. My sister and I were in an accident many years ago where the kid driving had a fake license and temporary tags, neither of which could ID the vehicle or driver. Having the VIN was the only thing that enabled the police to find him a couple of weeks later.
And God forbid you actually *need* a 4-door diesel dually for towing stuff - you're looking at closer to $70,000.
I've been quite happy with my Mossberg 590A1. 18.5" barrel, 9-round magazine, and a Knoxx Spec-Ops stock. The Knoxx stock is amazing - I did a full 8-hour self-defense course with it and after about 600 rounds including 3" magnum slugs, my shoulder wasn't the least bit sore.
The other four impact sites weren't found right after the missions themselves as the summary says. They were also found by the LROC team, just more quickly because they had a better idea where to look for them. I noticed that as soon as I hit "Submit". Sorry guys, I fail at reading comprehension.
I use a VPS at Joe's Datacenter for offsite backups and other odds and ends and have been quite pleased with the service. $6/month, and they're very good about notices and status updates regarding system issues, upgrades, etc.
They're big and geeky looking, but the BlueParrott B250-XT has an awesome noise-cancelling mic. I can drive down the highway at 70mph with the windows down and the person at the other end won't hear a thing except me. The sound quality on my end is a little peaky, but otherwise it's been a pretty decent headset. Ridiculously long battery life too.
My wife just tells me I give her headaches. No electronics needed.
Don't cloud the issue with mere facts!
They like "freedom" when it means "things I personally approve of", which makes a mockery of what freedom actually is.
Insightful quote of the day.
while this is true, it's perfectly legal to issue a subpoena or some other court order to collect evidence of a crime or a plan of future criminal activity.
That court order is called a "warrant". Subpoenas are also issued by the court or its officers, but only in conjunction with a pending court case. The main point is that the court issues both of those documents, not an executive agency under its own authority. Also, note that the Fourth Amendment covers "persons, houses, papers, and effects", not just "homes or property".
now go back to elementary school and maybe post those stupid meme's of the founders' quotes that are taken out of context
Probably not a good idea to impugn the education of another while conflating plurals and possessives in the same sentence. Yeah, I'm being a grammar Nazi on purpose, but that's just because you could have made your point in a civil manner.
You should probably do it while naked, cold, hungry, and being beaten every time a verbose compiler flags an error. You should learn to code as if your life depends on it. Except no substitutes!
;-)
*** SYNTAX ERROR LINE 3 - UNEXPECTED VERB "EXCEPT"