The QPC paradox

I think that almost everybody in the software industry would agree that most of the software that is produced today does not have the quality that it should. Let’s assume that this is a fact: the quality of software, in general, is deficient.

How can we improve the quality of the software that we produce? Many experts have proposed myriads of tools, techniques, methodologies, approaches and paradigms that promised to deliver better software, that is, software of higher quality. Supposedly, this was to be achieved because the proposed tools, techniques, etc. were more powerful than the current ones. The argument goes like this: if the results that you are obtaining are of poor quality, use more powerful tools. Better tools will allow you to create the same things, but of higher quality. And it makes sense, doesn’t it.

However, the average quality of software has not improved for decades. I would love to insert a quotation here to back this up, but I can’t remember where I saw it. I promise. Somebody (presumably an expert) recently said that the average quality of software has remained constant for decades. How come, if we have more powerful tools than ever?

My data has been recovered!

You know that my hard disk crashed a few days ago. Well, I’ve just seen on dtidata’s online tracking system that all my data has been recovered. Good on them!

Phew.

Visigoth epigonism

Yesterday Isabel showed me one of her old text books from high school. It is tattered and torn and on the spine you can barely read “History”. I flipped through the pages, feeling the smell and the old-fashioned layout, and suddenly something caught my eye. Left page, inner column, midway from the top, in all-caps bold type: “VISIGOTH EPIGONISM”.

I immediately recognised the words. That wasn’t my book, but surely enough I used the same edition when I did history at high school. I will never forget the topic on Visigoth epigonism; I was 16, a curious kid quite well read for his age, and when I first stumbled against those words that I could not recognise, they got engraved in some engram at the back of my head.

I knew who the Visigoth were. I had studied history before and I had a rough idea of what they looked like in the pictures of the books. And I had watched a movie about them too! But “epigonism”… I had no clue about that word. I remember reading through the passage in the history book and being completely unable to infer the meaning of the title from the meaning of the text.

The click of death

Last Tuesday I went to bed and I left my laptop on, as I often do. They say that they live longer if you don’t keep switching them on and off all the time, because circuit boards and other components suffer badly from thermal stress. I am not sure if this has a noticeable effect on the life of a computer, but anyway, my poor old laptop takes soooo long to boot up and open a session that I usually leave it on all night.

Next morning I found it with a blank (i.e. black) screen and the dreaded message “No boot device can be found”. First thought: “it has rebooted”. Second thought: “and it cannot start”. I press the power switch to turn it off, wait 5 seconds (they say you need to wait for the capacitors to discharge ) and switch it on again. Dell logo, first boot messages, and click, click, click, click, click…

The hard disk was clicking. The click of death, as they say. Clicking noises inside a hard disk only mean one thing: there is something mechanical going wrong. I could visualise the disk heads landing on the platters and leaving a trailing trench and lots of nasty particles scattered all over the place. My precious data!