Hi all,

let me just throw in the cost curve (Barry Boehm I think). A bug gets exponentially more expensive, the later it's found. And the fact that for x bugs found during testing you can be sure to deliver n*x bugs to the customer. n maybe <<1 but still. Don't know the source of this any more.

I'm bitten by a workflow of quick commits (we are also using Git) as a QA person in my day job where they also add hasty reviews to the quick commits. So I kind of cringed when I read Christoph's  post :-).

Still a complex or tedious workflow is also bad for quality and productivity so that's the point of the post I fully agree with.

I'm too far away from Squeak but would it be a possibility to have small commits in Git (or elsewhere) and consolidated bigger ones for a proper ancestry? At least we need to be very careful when changing the community process.

Best regards,

Herbert

> Maybe for git-based projects, a commit-first, fix-later strategy is what that culture likes and that system can support, but it's not a good fit for Squeak's trunk.

And that's why - sorry for rolling out my old chestnut again - I still do believe that a git-based workflow could make us as a community more efficient.

I don't question that manual testing is great, and I don't question that quality can increase if you give your patches time for maturing, but when I compare the resulting workflow to the "mainstream" workflow that I can use anywhere on GitHub, I repeatedly have the dissatisfying feeling that the inbox/trunk workflow is so slow that it ruins all the efficiency from the Smalltalkish development workflow (which, however, unquestionably outperforms the "mainstream" workflow in a dead, non-live UI without first-class objects for code and tools!).

This might apply most significantly to small changes that would form a PR of two or three commits in a git project because our inbox workflow does not scale so well for changes of such extent. I do not know how many hours I already have spent on fixing the ancestry of my versions, comparing them to their ancestors, or re-uploading them, but it has definitively been too many hours ...

Did someone ever investigate this question seriously by doing a study or so? I would really find the results interesting.

Best,

Christoph

---

Von: Squeak-dev <squeak-dev-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org> im Auftrag von Chris Muller <asqueaker@gmail.com>
Gesendet: Dienstag, 29. September 2020 01:00 Uhr
An: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Betreff: Re: [squeak-dev] tedious programming-in-the-debugger error needs fixing

 

On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 10:07 AM Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Christoph,

On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 7:58 AM Thiede, Christoph <Christoph.Thiede@student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de> wrote:

Hi Eliot,

I'm very sorry for this bug, which was so unnecessary because my image has still a gigantic working copy ...! Tools-ct.988 should fix the issue, I tested it in a fresh trunk image. But it would be probably better if you could test it yourself, too. ;-)

No need to apologise.  It's an easy mistake, and you fixed it.  As long as we're all patient with each other and take responsibility (Andreas said "if you break it, you fix it") we're going to get along fine and be collectively productive.

The following is not addressed to Christoph or his commit, but to Eliots comment, above:  Patience should begin within our development methodology.  The words above are correct and sweet, and I agree with them, but I feel the need to caution against the implication that "everything's great as long as you fix it afterward."  Maybe for git-based projects, a commit-first, fix-later strategy is what that culture likes and that system can support, but it's not a good fit for Squeak's trunk.  I believe Andreas understood this, and he indicated that "breaking the trunk is generally frowned upon."

When it comes to code less than 24 hours old, no matter how simple it seems, chances are about 80% that a subsequent "oops, sorry" commit will need to follow.  With "older," (e.g., even only just 48 hours!) tested code, that chance drops significantly.  Patience.  Restraint.  Please.  :)  Let our methodology put time to work for us, by living with our changes for a bit (as, it sounds like, Christoph did!) and witness them work in context.  Maybe not this time, but generally, you'll have a gist enough to know whether it should be loaded and tested separately in a clean trunk first.

Cheers,

  Chris