It's a great memo, and well worth the read. Sure, some of it seems obvious in hindsight, but it was written before a lot (most?) of HN participants were born. I do have one disagreement:
Both of these are counter-productive strategies for dealing with bugs. Plan carefully so they don’t happen. If they happen anyway, you should be embarrassed, and find out why your plans failed.
Eh, not every bug, and maybe not most, should be cause for embarrassment. Perhaps the potential embarrassment should come from why the bug got through. Code has high complexity? Yeah, there's a permutation in there that you're going to miss, but that's not necessarily the coder's fault. OTOH, didn't run the unit test suite before check-in? Okay, you get to wear the "I broke the build" t-shirt today.
It's a great memo, and well worth the read. Sure, some of it seems obvious in hindsight, but it was written before a lot (most?) of HN participants were born. I do have one disagreement:
Both of these are counter-productive strategies for dealing with bugs. Plan carefully so they don’t happen. If they happen anyway, you should be embarrassed, and find out why your plans failed.
Eh, not every bug, and maybe not most, should be cause for embarrassment. Perhaps the potential embarrassment should come from why the bug got through. Code has high complexity? Yeah, there's a permutation in there that you're going to miss, but that's not necessarily the coder's fault. OTOH, didn't run the unit test suite before check-in? Okay, you get to wear the "I broke the build" t-shirt today.