Is there any human activity where quality is an attribute successfully taught? In my experience, being able to produce something of quality is gained only through practice, practice, practice.
> Is there any human activity where quality is an attribute successfully taught?
Every industrial practice.
On the other hand, the title just means that programming is not an industrial practice. What should be obvious to anybody that looked, but some people insist on not seeing it.
For pilots, there are many filters to ensure people that failed to learn can't take many responsibilities. They ensure the pilots study and train, but there isn't any theory making sure the pilots learn and get the best safety practices. (In fact, if you are comparing with CS teaching, pilot teaching will give you a heart attack.)
For engineers, the situation is very similar to software. There are many tools for enforcing quality, but there's no structure for teaching the engineers, and no, there isn't a widely accepted theory for how to teach design quality either.
The one place where people are consistently taught how to build quality is on manufacturing.
Aviation in particular has a very strong culture around (government mandated) checklists and post-crash investigations. This has both pros and cons. The pros is that every airline learns from the mistakes made by every other airline and over time the system becomes really quite safe indeed. The cons are that it is quite expensive and time consuming.
Imagine if every software company was obliged by law to:
- Every single release has to have been signed off by someone who got their "software release engineer" certification at the software equivalent of the FAA.
- This engineer is required by law to not sign off unless every box on a 534 item checklist has been manually verified.
- Any time an unplanned downtime happens at any company, a government team comes in to investigate the root cause and add points nr 535 through 567 to the checklist to make sure it never happens again.
If such a system was mandated for software companies, most of the common bugs would very rapidly become a thing of the past. Development velocity would also fall through the floor though, and most startups would probably die overnight. Only companies that could support the overhead of such a heavyweight process would be viable, and the barrier to entry would massively increase.
I wish someone would create that 500 line checklist. I've seem attempts, but they tend to be either not actionable (is the software high quality - meaningless), or of metrics that are just gamed (is test code coverage > 80%?)
If I understand his theory correctly, in your case there would be a competing metric to the "test coverage" one that said for any changeset, a test cannot itself change by more than 20% in the same changeset as non-test code. So you can change the code such that it still passes the existing tests, or you can change the test to adapt to new requirements, but you cannot rewrite the tests to match your newly changed code
I'm acutely aware this is a terrible example, the devil's in the details, and (in my experience) each company's metrics are designed to drive down their own organizational risk <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law>, combined with "you're always fighting the last war" :-D
> > Aviation in particular has a very strong culture around (government mandated) checklists and post-crash investigations
That's the reason why aviation can only shine when it becomes a private means of transportation, and I don't mean 70mm private jets but, 150k light helicopters.
When a critical mass is hit then accidents will become no more traumatic to the collective psyche than car accidents, the lighter the aircraft the better because it would seem exactly like a car crash as opposed to leaving a huge burning hole into the ground
Citation needed. The key to the industrial revolution was trivializing the human work so as to take as many human errors out as possible and to systematize everything. I wouldn't call that type of process "teaching quality".
Good teaching largely consists of setting the learner up in situations where they can practice effectively. To pick just one example many people are taught to improve the quality of their writing. This largely consists of giving guidance on what writing to attempt and (more importantly) guidance how to reflect on the quality of the writing you've just done so you can improve.
The arts. The further and further you go in instruction, the more it becomes about the little differences and quality. Practice always helps, but quality definitely taught and learned by many as well.
I cannot fly professionally anymore due to health, but this is something we are taught in aviation and something I too find lacking from tech so far.
Like, you’re taught the standards as part of learning to fly, but as time goes on, you’re told to narrow your tolerance of what is acceptable. So if you are learning how to do steep turns, for instance, the altitude standard is +- 100’. You’re taught, “that’s the minimum, you should be trying for 50’” and then 20’, then the absolute best performance would be where you do your turn, the needle doesn’t move, and as you roll out on a calm day you fly through your wake. But the goal is “better, always better, what can I do better?” And flying is not graded on the overall performance, if you don’t do satisfactory everywhere you fail. Culturally satisfactory, isn’t, it’s the starting point.
That encourages a much more collaborative model I feel like. I’ve only worked one or two flying jobs that were not collaborative. In the outside world it sometimes feels the opposite. In flying, you truly want everyone to succeed and do well, and the company does. Even the guys I hated that I flew with, I didn’t want them to fail. If they failed, I was partially responsible for that.
It wasn’t always perfect, and I worked with some legendary assholes while I was flying, but truly, they supported me and I supported them, and if I screwed up (or they screwed up) the culture required that we found a way to minimize the future potential screwups.
You’re actually trained on what quality means in a wide variety of contexts too, and flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) is a big part of many airlines. In smaller bush operations where I worked, it is significantly more informal, but we truly had a “no fault” culture in nearly all the places I worked. It’s not perfect, but that’s the point, “ok how can we make this better?”
If someone had an idea for how to do something better, there may have been friction, but that was rare if it actually was better, and as soon as you could show how adoption was fast even at the less standardized operations I worked at.
Not saying it’s all unicorns and rainbows, but I feel like quality, and decision making, and “doing the right thing” were an integral part of the culture of aviation. “The weather is too bad and I cannot do this safely” grounds the flight, you don’t blast off into the shit (at reputable operators) to get the job done anymore (it’s not 1995), and it feels like this new industry is the opposite.
The entire concept of a “minimum viable product” is somewhat illustrative of the problem. It shouldn’t be the “minimum viable” it should be the “minimum quality product we’re willing to accept as a starting point.” But that doesn’t roll off the tongue in the same way.
We shouldn’t be striving for anything that’s the “minimum.” The minimum is only the beginning.
> But the goal is “better, always better, what can I do better?”
Is that not the case in software? The incentive to improve may not be quite as strong as in aviation (crashing software isn't quite the same as crashing airplanes), but it is still pretty strong. Life is very miserable in software when quality isn't present.
What happens when you work under a group of people who are satisfied at stage one of project X? You know you can iterate to get two stages further, but they want you to work on projects Y and Z. This is a very common situation where you, or even the whole development team has very little control.
Of course, management should be supportive of quality improvements, but their reality is either one where they are under genuine pressure to deliver projects X and Y to stage of quality through to not understanding or caring about quality.
My own experience is that individual programmers have vastly different ideas of quality is based on their experience and education. You can be struggling to get a team to improve and then you hire a somewhat normal individual with a very different background who makes a sizeable impact on quality and the culture of this in the team. I'm thinking specifically of someone who joined from aerospace, but I've seen it with finance backgrounds. I think the background matters less than the perspective and ability to hold people accountable (including yourself.)
> What happens when you work under a group of people who are satisfied at stage one of project X?
No doubt the same as when the members of your garage band are happy to stay in the garage while you have your sights set on the main stage. You either suck it up and live in the misery, or you get better on your own time and leverage those improvements in the quality of your performance to move into a better position where quality is valued.
Practice only matters if you try to produce quality. If you just practice producing crap you'll only get good at producing crap. But I suppose if someone doesn't care about quality (and these people do exist) all bets are off really.
