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Is software getting worse?
(blog.ploeh.dk)
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It seems to me that the author doesn't remember all the struggles we had back then with bugs and features not working. And masses of needed functionality that never got skipped into the hands of users. It also strikes me that maybe there is a bit of nostalgia, just a bit of reluctance to change his ways. He found a workflow around the missing functionality that might be blocking for others and he has a harder time adjusting to the new functionality.
A bit like my father that refused to change his workflow, to make images for webpages (all static) he used for different Amiga programs because one could scale the images, one could edit them add lines and stuff, one for helping him make image maps, and they one so they could be converted to jpg/png as anim files used by everything else on the amiga didn't work well on the internet.
Bug testing back then was awful, we never had time to catch any issues but the biggest. The time plan for the release was fixed years ahead, the functionality that was needed was fixed years ahead. All the needed time for testing was eaten up by the developers working into the final skip to customers, trying to make the software actually run. It wasn't uncommon for test teams trying to cramp months of eating into a weekend to have the software skipped on Monday morning. Well including masses of needed bug fixes during that weekend that no one knew what code each issue was actually tested on. Remember that software version control system was almost not used, there was no CI build system all all software was built on some random developers workstation. Maybe, with some additional changes for his or her convenience. No software development has come a long way since the 90s. A very long way!