> describe to your customer and users what you have actually developed.
In the domain I work in, what customers want (and what we provide) changes monthly at worst, annually at best. And in many cases, customers do not know what they want until they have already used some existing version, and is subject to continual revision as their understanding of their own goals evolves.
This is true for more or less all software used in "creative" fields.
I don't understand how this practice makes your modern code more reliable, sorry
I was replying to
>Are modern codebases with modern practices less buggy than the ones from 20 years ago?
I understood that @NayamAmarshe acknowledged about new practices and tools introduced after my examples, in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s (mostly with agile everywhere, and v-methods becoming a red flag on a resume and in business meetings).
It seemed to be the essence of their question.
So all I was saying was that codes from back then where capable of being safe. Reliability wasn't invented by modern practices.
Modern practices have only changed the development process, as you mentioned. Not the safety.
And if it did, it affected safety, as doing provably safe code with new practices is still being researched at the academic level.
(check out the case of functional safety vs/with agile methods)
Can you explain how do you make your code less buggy, than a code from 20 years ago, with practices from back then ?
My point was that you cannot use the software development processes used in planes and transportation systems in every area of software development. Those processes are extremely reliant on a fully-determined specification, and these do not exist for all (maybe even most?) areas.
If you're inevitably locked into a cycle of evolving customer expectations and desires, it is extremely hard and possibly impossible to, for example, build a full coverage testing harness.
In the domain I work in, what customers want (and what we provide) changes monthly at worst, annually at best. And in many cases, customers do not know what they want until they have already used some existing version, and is subject to continual revision as their understanding of their own goals evolves.
This is true for more or less all software used in "creative" fields.