Comment by _wire_

Comment by _wire_ 7 days ago

5 replies

Any involvement in reporting / fixing bugs is development. Why do app developers think their customers need to be or want to be developers?

What other industry relies on its customers as implicit developers?

Making bug reporting easier means an intentional push to foist more of Development's work upon customers and a bias towards more bugs.

BUG OR FEATURE?

If you can't tell, then we can understand why Knuth call it "the art" of computer programming, as in the artist's uncertainty of creation as compared to the engineer's confidence.

The fact that half the SW industry prefers to avoid a distinction between bugs and features— as in bugs that don't get reported are regarded as features— shows the profligate laziness and opportunism of so called Software Engineering.

AI is a stunning example of a global industry built by computer technologists who don't care about understanding their own work, and lack the creative and social spark to conduct themselves as artists.

Just listen G. Hinton babble philosophically for 10 minutes and you will grasp the magnitude of incompetence at work.

TheAceOfHearts 7 days ago

I think reporting problems is just part of being a good citizen that participates in a shared culture. If I visit a park or shop and something is broken, it's worth putting in a bit of effort to report it. If everyone chips in a little bit of effort it makes the overall experience of everyone much better. Are you the type of person to also not return the shopping cart to the corral?

The number of hardware and software combinations are impossibly large, so you're unlikely to be handling everything perfectly if the application is doing anything complicated.

foobarchu 7 days ago

> What other industry relies on its customers as implicit developers?

I would say most of them. To list a few:

- restaurants (almost all of them will send you feedback surveys these days, they also rely on you to tell them if they, for example, cooked your steak to the wrong temp)

- property maintenance (again, feedback surveys)

- auto mechanics (if the thing they fixed is still broken, a good mechanic wants to know)

- doctors (they rely heavily on YOU to tell you what wrong with your body)

- democratic political systems (when working correctly)

- road infrastructure (the city won't fix potholes nobody is reporting, and they won't do anything about badly tuned traffic lights nobody complains about)

- vaccines and medicine (the testing phase may not uncover every possible single side effect, they need recipients/users to report those if they happen)

(Please nobody come back with cynical takes on how these aren't helpful in their specific case/location, that's clearly not the point)

  • bdangubic 7 days ago

    none of these are bugs, they are complaints about specific date/time/incident.

    restaurants

    undercooked steak is not a bug unless every single steak on every single day is undercooked

    property maintenance

    same thing (and weird example)

    auto mechanics

    also not a bug, bad part, mechanic who didn’t get laid the nite before… not bugs…

    doctors

    not sure how to even respond to this… :)

    democratic political systems

    would be nice :)

    road infrastructure

    wear and tear :)

    • foobarchu 7 days ago

      I think it's a given that I'm not using perfect metaphors, dissecting them is ignoring the point.

      Users operate with different configurations, hardware, and needs. It is literally impossible to release bug free software. Every developer should try their best, obviously, but NOT requesting that bugs be reported is pure hubris on anyone's part

    • bee_rider 7 days ago

      The unfortunate situation is that bugs in modern software just seem to… show up, as if their appearance is an ongoing maintainence issue rather than the outcome of something somebody on the development team did.

      But, anyone who took the time to write bug-free code went out of business decades ago.