Comment by braiamp
2 months ago
This is funny, considering that someone that worked on the defense industry (guide missile system) found a memory leak on one of their products, at that time. They told him that they knew about it, but that it's timed just right with the range of the system it would be used, so it doesn't matter.
This paraphrased urban legend has nothing to do with quality engineering though? As described, it's designed to the spec and working as intended.
It tracks with my experience in software quality engineering. Asked to find problems with something already working well in the field. Dutifully find bugs/etc. Get told that it's working though so nobody will change anything. In dysfunctional companies, which is probably most of them, quality engineering exists to cover asses, not to actually guide development.
It is not dysfunctional to ignore unreachable "bugs". A memory leak on a missile which won't be reached because it will explode long before that amount of time has passed is not a bug.
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Having observed an average of two mgmt rotations at most of the clients our company is working for this comes at absolutely no surprise to me. Engineering is acting perfectly reasonable, optimizing for cost and time within the constraints they were given. Constraints are updated at a (marketing or investor pleasure) whim without consulting engineering, cue disaster. Not even surprising to me anymore...
... until the extended-range version is ordered and no one remembers to fix the leak. :]
Ariane 5 happens.
They will remember, because it'll have been measured and documented, rigorously.
I've found that the real trick with documentation isn't creation, it's discovery. I wonder how that information is easily found afterwards.
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Was this one measured and documented rigorously?
Well obviously not, because the front fell off. That’s a dead giveaway.
My hunch is that we do the same with memory leaks or other bugs in web applications where the time of a request is short.