Talk at Yale: Part 1 of 3 - Joel on Software - The Diigo Meta page

• 03 Jul 09
  

  Joel Liu

  Computer science Education

• 23 Jan 09
  

  Melvin Xie

  Dev

• 16 Dec 07
  

  Jian Chen
  • If the spec defines precisely what a program will do, with enough detail that it can be used to generate the program itself, this just begs the question: how do you write the spec?
  • Microsoft has had a long term policy of eliminating all software testers who don’t know how to write code, replacing them with what they call SDETs, Software Development Engineers in Test, programmers who write automated testing scripts.
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • None of those things could be checked by automated scripts.
    • new emphasis on automated testing was that the Vista release of Windows was extremely inconsistent and unpolished. Lots of obvious problems got through in the final product… none of which was a “bug” by the definition of the automated scripts
• 06 Dec 07
  

  pilandok
  • The old testers at Microsoft checked lots of things: they checked if fonts were
    consistent and legible, they checked that the location of controls on dialog
    boxes was reasonable and neatly aligned, they checked whether the screen
    flickered when you did things, they looked at how the UI flowed, they considered
    how easy the software was to use, how consistent the wording was, they worried
    about performance, they checked the spelling and grammar of all the error
    messages, and they spent a lot of time making sure that the user interface was
    consistent from one part of the product to another, because a consistent user
    interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one.
• 05 Dec 07
  

  Peter Shanks

  I like Joel's style of writing and the quality of his thoughts. This article (the first of 3, see also 04.html and 05.html) discusses software development in general and training in particular, and is a generally good read

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• 

  Olifante *

  "I don’t happen to agree with [the claim that software engineering is facing a quality crisis of some sort] — the computer software most people use most of the time is of ridiculously high quality compared to everything else in their lives"

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