Ancestors

Written by Kevlin Henney on 2025-01-22 at 10:02

One of the interesting things about being in software development and also being a consumer of software is you notice oversights or (less often) niceties in how things are done.

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Written by Kevlin Henney on 2025-01-22 at 10:04

One of the most common I notice is blind spots in a product's testing. E.g., it's fairly obvious that testing of font-spacing in Microsoft PowerPoint is very weak.

A common consequence of an update I notice is text gets nudged one way or another in an existing file (and sometimes when you're editing). This means that sometimes previously carefully sized text will wrap around or that it will misalign from slide to slide.

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Written by Kevlin Henney on 2025-01-22 at 10:07

If they regression-tested the visual effect with any thoroughness, this would be picked up. If they unit-tested the code responsible for calculation, this would be picked up.

But I guess that either the calculation code is so messy that "There's no way we can unit test that" or it's considered so trivial that "There's no point in testing that". And for UI-level testing, they may have made an explicit decision to not worry about things visually being misplaced by a pixel or two.

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Written by Kevlin Henney on 2025-01-22 at 10:08

Empirically, we can conclude that none of these decisions has survived contact with reality, and that revisiting the decisions and improving testing is what needs to be done.

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Toot

Written by William Bartlett on 2025-01-22 at 10:26

@kevlin, you're forgetting that "there are no significant bugs in [Microsoft's] released software that any significant number of users want fixed." Bill Gates. Focus Magazine interview. 1995.

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Descendants

Written by Kevlin Henney on 2025-01-22 at 10:38

@punkstarman Ah, such halcyon days!

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