If ownerless code doesn’t result in discoverability efforts then the whole thing goes off the rails.
I won’t remember this block of code because five other people have touched it. So I need to be able to see what has changed and what it talks to so I can quickly verify if my old assumptions still hold true
You say this like trivial misstakes did not happen all the time in classical engineering as well.
If there is a memory leak, them this is a flaw, that might not matter so much for a specific product, but I can also easily see it being forgotten, if it was maybe mentioned somewhere in the documentation, but maybe not clear enough and deadlines and stress to ship are a thing there as well.
Most of the time QA can tell you exactly how the product works, regardless of what the documentation says. But many of us haven’t seen a QA team in five, ten years.
Just try harder. And if it still breaks, clearly you weren't trying hard enough!
At some point you have to admit that humans are pretty bad at some things. Keeping documentation up to date and coherent is one of those things, especially in the age of TikTok.
Better to live in the world we have and do the best you can, than to endlessly argue about how things should be but never will become.
Was this one measured and documented rigorously?
Well obviously not, because the front fell off. That’s a dead giveaway.
I've found that the real trick with documentation isn't creation, it's discovery. I wonder how that information is easily found afterwards.
If ownerless code doesn’t result in discoverability efforts then the whole thing goes off the rails.
I won’t remember this block of code because five other people have touched it. So I need to be able to see what has changed and what it talks to so I can quickly verify if my old assumptions still hold true
By reading the documentation thoroughly as a compulsory first step to designing the next system that depends on it.
I realise this may probably boggle the mind of the modern software developer.
You say this like trivial misstakes did not happen all the time in classical engineering as well.
If there is a memory leak, them this is a flaw, that might not matter so much for a specific product, but I can also easily see it being forgotten, if it was maybe mentioned somewhere in the documentation, but maybe not clear enough and deadlines and stress to ship are a thing there as well.
That is not how this usually works.
Most of the time QA can tell you exactly how the product works, regardless of what the documentation says. But many of us haven’t seen a QA team in five, ten years.
Just try harder. And if it still breaks, clearly you weren't trying hard enough!
At some point you have to admit that humans are pretty bad at some things. Keeping documentation up to date and coherent is one of those things, especially in the age of TikTok.
Better to live in the world we have and do the best you can, than to endlessly argue about how things should be but never will become.