Re:Tips for beginning systems and software engineers
by komali2 on Thursday May 19, 2016 @12:41PM
(#11731486)
Off-topic, but I've always felt like "silver bullet" isn't a very good metaphor to use because we keep using it sarcastically, as above. Wasn't the silver bullet the only way to stop a werewolf? Or does the phrase come from somewhere else?
Anyway maybe something like magic bean or some other "looks useful but turned out not to be" metaphor would be better, not sure which one though.
Re:Tips for beginning systems and software engineers
by kabdib on Thursday May 19, 2016 @01:18PM
(#11731803)
"Silver bullet" was popularized (if not coined) by Fred Brooks in _The Mythical Man-Month_, and since that book is pretty widely read, the term is well understood. It's definitely sarcastic, but that doesn't mean it's not accurate.
[Depending on your mythology, you can kill a werewolf with a silver sword, and probably other silver objects. Poul Anderson has an interesting treatment of werewolf vulnerabilities in his collection _Operation Chaos_]
Automated test systems, in my experience, have sucked pretty hard. Often written by Q/A engineers frustrated at not being "real" engineers [yeah I know, toxic culture], and just not written well. Like the test systems I could never install on my workstation or even get running on my own, in order to reproduce problems and debug them. Or the systems that would assign "Priority 0 wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night" issues to failures in the test framework itself. Test frameworks are best kept as simple as possible; be wary of architecture astronautics.
I like the "TDD is nice, use it when it's useful" attitude. TDD as a tyranny works about as well as any other silver bullet we've seen in software development over the years (that is, not very well).