Re: Hokay, I officially give up...

On Fri, 22 May 2009, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> On Fri, 22 May 2009, Dave Stagner wrote:
>
>> A system that can do failover, but only with the correct admins to
>> babysit and deal with surprises, "barely works".
>
> So, why do you insist on calling it "barely works" instead of "meeting
> requirements"?

I think it's mainly attitude.  Especially considering you can define 
expectations down.  To what extent did you clear the hurdle by jumping 
high enough, and to what extent did you clear the hurdle by lowering the 
height of the hurdle?

This is a pernicious attitude in our industry, that I see regularly. 
*Especially* when it's used to resist improvements that come with 
reasonable or small costs and bring with them large improvements in code 
quality (such as unit testing or strong typing).  We don't need to do 
that, the attitude is- so long as the users are willing to accept 
bug-ridden, fragile code, which only qualifies as "meeting requirements" 
if you relax the requirements.

Brian