Making software better despite having users
summary
ScalaTest faces concrete tradeoffs: half a million users makes behaviour changes costly; a buggy triple-equals DSL gets fixed for users only if a compiler plug-in gives compile-time errors or the language gains stronger unification. A newly added position macro leaking full path breaks reproducible builds at a large bank, so the release uses an env var workaround in 3.1 and reserves the real fix for 4.0. Versioning promises, 18‑month deprecation cycles, and migration tools drive practical upgrades.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:43Why Scala
- 7:30Users
- 18:15Versions
- 24:54Keeping promises
- 25:06Deprecation
- 26:13Silent killers
- 27:47Migration tools
- 30:43Conclusion
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