On Fri, Oct 13, 2006, Robert Duke wrote:
> At microsoft they actually made folks who broke the build
> wear a dunce cap for the day, hoping the social pressure would get them to
> clean up their act. By the time I was there, they had gotten a bit more
> politically correct, and had reverted to just having half your management
> chain and your coworkers come into your office and take your head off; I
> expect it affected bonuses also.
OK: starting now, I will consider withholding annual bonuses from anyone who
checks in bad code. :-)
Seriously: people need to be much more diligent about running the test suite
with new code. We will try to get the nightly test script running again on a
variety of machines and compilers. For this really to work, tests have to
PASS. This may take more work than we have typically exerted in the past to
distinguish acceptable round-off errors from real errors.
In my view, we have to live with having lots of cooks, and having the kitchen
sometimes be messy. After all, learning how to contribute to a shared effort
is a part of one's scientific education and training. And there are a lot of
good ideas that a smaller group of people would never have time to test and
implement. But we should move in the direction of being more careful with
what goes into the code, and with continuing to add regression tests to help
ensure that things that are working now don't get broken later.
Thanks also to everyone who posted their views on this issue.
...dac
Received on Sun Oct 15 2006 - 06:07:11 PDT
