[Numpy-discussion] NumPy 1.7 release delays

[Peter Wang]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 9:33 AM, Charles R Harris
<charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 7:20 AM, John Hunter <jdh2358 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> because the original developers are gone.  So people are loathe to
>> upgrade.  It is certainly true that deprecations that have lived for a
>> single point release cycle have not been vetted by a large part of the
>> user community.
>
> I'd also venture a guess that many of those installations don't have
> adequate test suites.

Depends how you define "adequate".  If these companies stopped being
able to make money, model science, or serve up web applications due to
the lack of a test suite, then they would immediately put all their
efforts on it.  But for users for whom Numpy (and software in general)
is merely a means to an end, the management of technical debt and
future technology risk is merely one component of all the risk factors
facing the organization.  Every hour spent managing code and technical
debt is an hour of lost business opportunity, and that balance is very
conscientiously weighed and oftentimes the decision is not in the
direction of quality of software process.

In my experience, it's a toss up.. most people have reasonable unit
tests and small integration tests, but large scale smoke tests can be
very difficult to maintain or to justify to upper management.  Because
Numpy can be both a component of larger software or a direct tool in
its own right, I've found that it makes a big difference whether an
organization sees code as a means to an end, or an ends unto itself.

-Peter