Re:You are never taught how to build quality software
by nikhil896 on Friday December 08, 2023 @02:56PM
(#38573398)
It starts mattering more for consumer software when you reach mass scale. Somewhat hard-to-find bugs at the scale of hundreds of millions of users (like a social media company), turn into bugs faced by hundreds of thousands of users.
But at that scale (in my experience), QA is up front and center and is typically a core pillar of engineering orgs.
Re:You are never taught how to build quality software
by aidenn0 on Friday December 08, 2023 @05:45PM
(#38575701)
> It starts mattering more for consumer software when you reach mass scale. Somewhat hard-to-find bugs at the scale of hundreds of millions of users (like a social media company), turn into bugs faced by hundreds of thousands of users.
From a cynical point of view, if those hundreds of thousands of users will use your product despite the bugs, does it matter?
Re:You are never taught how to build quality software
by mdaniel on Friday December 08, 2023 @10:30PM
(#38578267)
People are only as loyal as their opportunities; if the competition is mostly the same as your product but has either fewer bugs or bugs in a less painful flow, buh-bye
I'm super cognizant that the cited example of "social media company" is its own special ball of wax, due to the network effect, and I wish to holy hell I knew how to fix that bug :-)
For some classes of bugs it can (e.g. if the software is so bad as to open you to a class-action lawsuit; in b2b software bugs that put you in breech of contract), but for many classes of consumer software, it's not clear to me that shipping software that works better is rewarded. Picking not-too-buggy software ahead of time is hard, people are slow to switch (even when the people encountering the bugs are the people selecting the software, which is often not the case), and people are good at subconsciously avoiding triggering bugs.