I haven't been following this series, but felt like responding to this particular message:
There is not a single programmer who has worked in a professional environment for longer than a week who would write a bunch of code and not test it to see if it works before turning it in.
Is the source of your statements work experience? If it is, I'd like to work where you do. I find it very dangerous that some people really believe what you wrote is the universal truth.
That just doesn't happen, it makes no sense what so ever. Its clear you and the author have never done proper coding. There is no speeding through a project long before the deadline and not running it at least once to see if it works.
Once you witness it in practice, it makes sense, even if it doesn't make it any better. As an example, when in the development process people later manually test the integrated features and report the bugs, resulting in separate tasks for the developers, irresponsible programmers may feel inclined to just pass on what they wrote, without running it even once, being all confident in their abilities. This lets them very quickly finish their tasks, and "in the worst case" they get another, about a bug. Then they finish fixing only that bug, and wait for the next one to be discovered, while making good progress on other tasks. If the progress is not properly assessed and the supervisors don't see the relationship between the initial task and the endless fixes, people can get away with such an approach, or may not even realize how inefficient they do their job. The next step is to imagine what happens if the manual testing doesn't cover the feature at all, for one reason or another...
Quality control on all levels is still a massive issue for a lot of reasons, one being that writing the sufficient automated tests, despite all the available tools and libraries, tends to consume more resources than the features' development itself, and it's hard to prove how much work doesn't have to be done later thanks to them. Especially to people with little idea about software development.
Again, this isn't about the series; I'll yet have to eventually see how it unfolded in the story. Also, I'd rather not get into how to avoid these things. That would fill books and it's a constant battle anyway...
last edited at Mar 13, 2020 3:32AM