It’s been a great couple of weeks for me. Even though there was a work trip in the middle, I had a couple days off, travel, two partial work days, and then 3 days with my daughter in Northern California.
It was a blast, SQL Saturday was great, and I feel much better coming back to work.
Throughout most of my career, people have complained that software is never tested enough, not tested well, and certainly not enough time is allocated in project plans. I’d also argue that all too often we don’t have people building software with experience in how to perform extensive testing. Most developers only have a rudimentary knowledge of software testing and that part of their skill set doesn’t receive constant training. However I’ve found plenty of QA people that were in the same situation. Some educate themselves and learn how to test better, but many go through the motions. They don’t take pride in their role as a software tester.
There have been lots of advances in automated testing and TDD methodologies over the years, which means that developers have been taking more of the responsibility, and effort, for testing code. It’s hard to know if this has resulted in higher quality code, lower quality, or a mix. Overall I think that the latter is likely. Code quality is all over the board, probably based more on the skill and talent of the individual developer than on any process.
That’s good for the companies that have hired strong developers, but not so great for our industry as a whole. We still produce lots of software that takes too long to develope, costs too much, and often has too many bugs. Overall we are sloppy and inconsistent in how we build software. Some of that is the nature of our business, one with such a low bar of entry that anyone can give software development a try.
I don’t know how we improve the quality of software, though I do think continuing to educate and train people on what works well is a good start. However I also think that we still need QA groups. We need people that will use software in ways that automated tests won’t. People that will press buttons, enter values, and push software in ways that developers would never consider using it. Most of all, we need QA and testing to be treated as a valuable part of our industry. We need QA people that view testing as a valid career path, not a stepping stone for junior developers that look to move on as soon as possible.
Steve Jones
Video and Audio versionsToday’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.
|
This editorial was originally published on Oct 13, 2008. It is being re-run as Steve is out today, traveling to a SQL in the City event and SQL Saturday in Sacramento.
It’s a fictional story, or at least I hope it is, but Bruce Schneier has a great piece on Identity Farming, a long term way to create false identities that would fit great in the spy world. Mr. Schneier doesn’t see a practical point in doing it, but it’s interesting from a data standpoint because he brings up a point. This could be done without a real person existing to back up all the data that’s created.
The part that strikes me from this piece is that all too often we make assumptions about the people or entities that created all the data we use. One bad foreign key, orphaned child row, or incorrectly transformed piece of data could snowball downhill at a tremendous rate and it might be hard to determine what is wrong.
The blog entry talks about our data shadows, which grow larger and larger all the time. Unless you are actively trying to limit yours, every day that are likely new entries in some database about your life. And more and more, various companies and institutions interact with our data shadows instead of us. Credit checks, marketing efforts, when we board an airplane or make a purchase, all of these require checks on the shadow of data in our lives, not necessarily ensuring that the shadow is tightly linked to each of us.
I’ve had more than my share of confusion because of my name; it’s common, in almost every database, and shared by thousands, if not millions of people. On on hand it means that I’m a little lost in the flood of “Steve Joneses” out there. On the other hand it makes it hard to correct mistakes. If there are 6 people with the same name and you have an orphaned record, who do you link it to? Do you guess? Infer it from the other data? I’d like to think you need to somehow research this, contact me, and make a note that the quality of this data could be suspect.
People working with information try to be accurate, but they get busy, and mistakes occur. I’m sure I’ll find more and more over time, and I don’t have a great solution for what might work better. I’d like to think that we would implement better checks for data quality, fuzzy searches, and somehow assign “risk” values to data. Something to let people know that there might have been some issue.
It’s a thorny problem, one that’s not going away, and likely to become more problematic in the future.
Steve Jones
Video and Audio versionsToday’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.
|
This editorial was originally published on Oct 17, 2008. It is being republished as Steve is on vacation.
This is kind of a US-based editorial, but I suspect that it applies in other countries as well. I caught this article about data center growth in Iowa, traditionally a farming state in the US. Iowa is making efforts to attract companies, including large ones like Microsoft and Google, to built data centers within its borders.
Quite a few data centers have been built lately in the middle of the US, in non-traditional IT or Telecom power areas. Not that some big cities haven’t gotten data centers as well, but it seems more and more that data centers are being built in out-of-the way places. I’ve seen Google add data centers in Oregon and Iowa, Microsoft adding them in Boulder and Dublin, as well as Quincy, Washington. Microsoft has added some large ones in big cities like Chicago and San Antonio as well.
It’s interesting that as we grow more and more, and with greater needs to be connected and in contact with each other that our technological advances have leveled the cost of entry into many industries. The publishing and music industries are struggling as every person can become their own producer, publisher, distributor, and talent. No longer does a musician need to move to Los Angeles or New York to get noticed. And no longer does a writer need to struggle along hoping to get a book contract. In both cases the Internet and various on-demand technologies enable each person to get their own content out into the real world and sell it themselves.
For those of us working in technology, it means that Silicon Valley and other technological hotbeds are not necessarily the place we need to live. More and more people are forgoing the need to build their business in a large city and instead doing it where they want to live. A company today might pick a place where the founder grew up, or where they went to school, or some other criteria.
Just as cities grew by attracting businesses to the places with large and diverse workforces, now small towns can do the same, by offering different types of amenities, tax structures, and more. And with large companies like Google and Microsoft helping to invest in some of these places, it might be that your next high-tech job is in someplace like Boulder, CO, which has seen tremendous data center growth.
Maybe I should even consider dedicating an acre or two out here at the ranch for a small data center. Anyone want to come work in Elbert County, CO?
Steve Jones
Video and Audio versionsToday’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.
|
