No safeguards?

Posted May 2, 2025 7:53 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: No safeguards? by marcH
Parent article: Some __nonstring__ turbulence

It's not that easy. Saying "mutation testing" to a developer who has never heard of it is probably not the best way to evangelize mutation testing... but it *is* the best search term to find tooling that enables you to actually do it (without having to reinvent everything from scratch). So we're stuck using fancy ten dollar words for these things at least some of the time.

No safeguards?

Posted May 2, 2025 14:44 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

Like all people in a "privileged" work environment, I'm not sure you realize how ridiculously little testing some code gets before being submitted. Discussing "mutation testing" with the corresponding submitters is like trying to discuss literature with children learning to read. Please wait until they've reached middle school? In the mean time, "manually" point at a couple lines in their submission and ask them if any test fails when they break them. You might rarely ever interact with any such people so you can't notice but I can promise you there are some who never bother to try anything like that. Learning to do that does not require _any_ search which is already too much for people absolutely not interested in spending any time finding any bug with their code[*]. The very first ("baby") step is fixing that _mindset_ and that's already difficult enough. Don't scare these people with textbooks, at least not at first.

I've used an education analogy which makes me wonder: does any programming education teach you anything about test coverage and trying to break your own code? Or version control, or code reviews, or CI, or any quality topic,... I don't remember any at all but it was a while ago. I learned it all on the job. But these were full time software jobs. Now think about all the people who do not software full time and think: How hard could software be? If it were hard, it wouldn't be called "soft"ware :-)

[*] that's the job of the "validation team". Their precious time should be spent writing new bugs^H code.

No safeguards?

Posted May 2, 2025 14:56 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> does any programming education teach you anything about test coverage and trying to break your own code? Or version control, or code reviews, or CI, or any quality topic,...

How could I forget the "ugliest" child of them all: build systems :-D

No safeguards?

Posted May 2, 2025 15:34 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Now think about all the people who do not software full time and think: How hard could software be? If it were hard, it wouldn't be called "soft"ware :-)

Job security? If software is hard, you have to leave it to the professionals?

I've only once worked in a pure software environment - it drove me almost suicidal. Pretty much every job I've had has been a small DP team supporting end users. There's no reason why software should be hard. If you have a mixed team of professional end users who can program, professional programmers who can end-user, AND EASY-TO-USE SOFTWARE, then doing things "right" isn't hard. That's why I'm a Pickie!!!

(And I don't call Excel, SQL, BQ/Oracle/etc easy to use.)

Cheers,
Wol