[OT]: lower-cost tools that did much lower-quality work
From: John Smith (a_at_nonymous.com)
Date: 10/23/04
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Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 08:22:32 -0400
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1651826,00.asp
Crashes Deserve a Closer Look
September 27, 2004
By Peter Coffee
We speak routinely of software crashing, but we don't give those events
nearly the level of scrutiny that we give to real-world crashes. An airplane
crash triggers a painstaking investigation. When software fails, the user is
told to hope that it works the next time. Is this any way to run an airline?
This jarring difference in "crash" response has mostly been ignored. I do
remember a comment, late in the 1980s, by one advocate of advanced software
development environments: He compared C and C++ developers trying to
diagnose a software failure to arson investigators roaming through the
charred and smoking debris in search of a recognizable fragment of the
match. Even at that time, there were superior counterexamples such as the
Lisp machine-but relentless price pressures in the workstation market, not
to mention the growing capability of PCs, drove developers down a path of
false economy toward lower-cost tools that did much lower-quality work.
One gallows humorist at Microsoft actually named a tool CRASH- for
Comparative Reliability Analysis of Software and Hardware-and promised
developers, among other things, the ability to calculate "a final score
other than pass or fail." Frankly, I don't understand that proposition at
all: It seems to me that software either meets its specification, including
a level of reliability sufficient to the intended task, or it does not.
What's between "pass" and "fail"? Would you ship a product rated "tolerate"?
Perhaps it's reasonable, though, to take a different view of mass-market
software, with consumers already having some intuitive understanding of the
"get what you pay for" difference between, for example, a Toyota and a
Lexus. Even so, from what I can see, it appears that the real difference is
not that a Lexus is more reliable, but rather that with the Lexus, you've
paid in advance for a higher level of hand-holding when something does go
wrong. Thanks, but I'll keep driving my apparently crash-proof Sienna, and
I'll keep choosing software that's reliable over software that offers extra
bells and whistles.
In the realm of software, the move to a service-based architecture offers
developers a more granular opportunity to vote for their own preferred
trade-off between doing more and failing less. Improved tools are emerging
for developers. Late last week, for example, I saw the most recent version
of Mindreef's SOAPscope, and found the newly released Version 4 update
making important improvements to support developers throughout a Web
services life cycle.
In the long run, a UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration)
repository may offer a Web service aggregator several choices of services
that meet an application's needs. One has to wonder if repository metadata
will soon include statistically based ratings of service availability,
accuracy and other metrics of performance history for that particular Web
service offering. If Consumer Reports can gather and publish reliability
histories for automobiles, will someone build testbed applications that
invoke various common Web services from different providers and
systematically record their response?
It's getting cheaper to gather data, in this as in every other realm. The
IEEE, for example, announced last week its first standard for automobile
"black box" recorders to give post-crash data to accident investigators,
such as that available following aircraft accidents.
Web services should enjoy no less.
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