Keynote: Build Good Software: Of Politics and Methods
summary
Considers the industrial environment of software development, focusing on the tension between delivering profitable software and delivering high-quality software. Discusses trade-offs between risk, profit and craftsmanship and outlines methods to relax that tension and create a virtuous cycle of improvement.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (30)
- 0:00Start
- 0:04Safety is not only a technical matter.
- 9:18The inevitable failure was exacerbated by politics.
- 10:59Complex systems have complex failures.
- 11:22Wicked problems are social problems which are ill formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision-makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing. ...
- 13:12Failure is inescapable.
- 13:46Our relationship to technology is utopian.
- 17:13Failure is the unintended and the unexpected.
- 18:15Discussion of The Software Problem which Delayed the First Shuttle Orbital Flight
- 18:35IBM System/4 Pi AP-101
- 24:02Human minds are mostly the same.
- 24:53Where do software faults happen?
- 27:08Few internal faults (e.g., coding errors internal to a software module) were uncovered during integration and system testing. (...) It appears that these coding errors are being detected and corrected before system testing begins.
- 28:17Human communication is at the root of most software faults.
- 28:38The trouble is ambiguity.
- 28:53The obvious step is to remove ambiguity from specification.
- 29:04Formal Specification and Documentation with Z A Case Study Approach Jonathan Bowen, 2003
- 30:01The next obvious step is to remove ambiguity from testing.
- 31:14An Evaluation of Random Testing Joe W. Duran and Simeon C. Ntafos, 1984
- 32:06Ambiguity cannot be removed.
- 32:29The shape of failure is the shape of the organization.
- 35:50The things we construct have consequences.
- 36:21The early Internet was distinctly utopian.
- 36:48A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace John Perry Barlow, 1996
- 40:16Advertising on the Internet is different. It is "programmatic".
- 41:27Internet advertising is surveillance.
- 42:31It therefore encodes political understanding of problem and of solution.
- 43:37We must understand the immediate consequence of our construction.
- 44:57Encode norms.
- 46:11Keep humans "in the loop".
