Comment by nyarlathotep_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nyarlathotep_ | Hacker News Reader

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> I also blame us, the SWE engineers, we are waay to easily busied around by these types of people who have no clue. Have professional integrity, tests is not optional or something that can be cut, it's part of SWE.

Then maybe most of what's done in the "tech-industry" isn't, in any real sense, "engineering"?

I'd argue the areas where there's actual "engineering" in software are the least discussed---example being hard real-time systems for Engine Control Units/ABS systems etc.

That _has_ to work, unlike the latest CRUD/React thingy that had "engineering" processes of cargo-culting whatever framework is cool now and subjective nonsense like "code smells" and whatever design pattern is "needed" for "scale" or some such crap.

Perhaps actual engineering approaches could be applied to software development at large, but it wouldn't look like what most programmers do, day to day, now.

How is mission-critical software designed, tested, and QA'd? Why not try those approaches?

Amen to that. Software Engineering as a discipline badly suffers from not incorporating well-known methods for preventing these kinds of disasters from Systems Engineering.

And when I say Systems Engineering I don't mean Systems Programming, I mean real Systems Engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_engineering

> How is mission-critical software designed, tested, and QA'd? Why not try those approaches?

Ultimately, because it is more expensive and slower to do things correctly, though I would argue that while you lose speed initially with activities like actually thinking through your requirements and your verification and validation strategies, you end up gaining speed later when you're iterating on a correct system implementation because you have established extremely valuable guardrails that keep you focused and on the right track.

At the end of the day, the real failure is in the risk estimation of the damage done when these kinds of systems fail. We foolishly think that this kind of widespread disastrous failure is less likely than it really is, or the damage won't be as bad. If we accurately quantified that risk, many more systems we build would fall under the rigor of proper engineering practices.

Accountability would drive this. Engineering liability codes are a thing, trade liability codes are a thing. If you do work that isn't up to code, and harm results, you're liable. Nobody is holding us software developers accountable, so it's no wonder these things continue to happen.

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