connect four (game)

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 1:55 PM, Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/26/2017 07:11 AM, bartc wrote:
>>> You may argue that testing doesn't matter for his small game, written
>>> for his own education and amusement.  The fact is that software in
>>> general is of abysmal quality across the boards, and promoting a habit
>>> of unit testing is good, even for trivial, home-grown stuff.
>>
>> I thought people were being hard on the OP.
>
> I wasn't being hard on the OP. My observation is about the state of
> *all* software.  My software especially, your software, Microsoft's
> software.  It all is of rather poor quality compared to the rigors of
> other industries like civil engineering, manufacturing, etc.

Not all software is poor quality compared to all examples of those
industries. You'll find the equivalent of software bugs in a lot of
hardware situations; the difference with software is that we have 100%
perfect reproduction in the end-user products, so we call it a design
flaw instead of a production artifact. (How often do you buy a box of
something and find that a couple of them just break?) Even in
large-scale civil engineering projects, there are plenty of
stupidities. The house I'm living in has a place where the tiled floor
doesn't quite align with the wall that it meets, and I can't figure
out why; somewhere, two things that ought to have been parallel just
aren't. Bridges have been known to crack, cars break down for no good
reason, your hamburger just doesn't taste right today.

Aviators have pinned down the best solution to this, I think. A pilot
is not expected to be perfect; he is expected to follow checklists. A
preflight checklist. A departure checklist. A landing checklist.
Everything that needs to be done right is mentioned on the list, and
you just go through the list and make sure you've done everything.
Interestingly enough, that approximately corresponds to unit testing
(or maybe integration testing) - you design a suite of tests, and
every time you do something, you make sure all the tests pass. Neither
test suites nor checklists can prevent all problems - but they CAN
prevent the same problems from cropping up again and again. (Which is
kinda important when you're dealing with airliners carrying hundreds
of people. They crash very rarely because the crew follow their
checklists religiously, and when they do, there's an investigation
that can result in new tests being added.)

ChrisA