Case Study – Morrison’s Software Quality

Spotted on one of the Morrison’s self-service checkouts this afternoon.

software-quality-morrison

“This dialogue should only be used if the Till application stops running. It is important that you contact the Morrisons Support desk to report this problem. The support desk will advice which button below should be pressed to restart the application. Log files will be captured during the logoff or restart.”

Pros and Cons’ Any comments?

Feature Comments

“Well my local Morisons doesn’t even have tills with a GUI”
“Are they trying to imply that only stupid people work at Morrison”

“I wasn’t sure how to start this comment as I didn’t want to come across as antagonistic or argumentative, so I’ll start with just a simple story.

I worked for a rather large SEO company a few years back and most of the developers there were highly intelligent and had either computer science degrees or degrees in mathematics, as quite a few of them worked on the algorithms that performed the SEO magic. The company’s two main algorithm writers were pompous, self-absorbed code-snobs. Code-snobs in the sense that they did not consider anyone worthy of calling themselves a programmer unless they could write their own compiler. I didn’t particularly get on with either of them, needless to say, I didn’t stay in the job very long as they both had a lot of clout with the management as they held the company by the balls as they owned, wrote and maintained the SEO algorithm code.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that I hate code-snobbery in all it’s guises and this article certainly comes across that way. I’ll admit, I didn’t know how to reverse a linked list off the top of my head, if I were to sit down and try to do it, I probably wouldn’t have done as grand a job as you or, for that matter, some of the other commenter here could have. So that makes me a crap programmer? How many times do you think, in my 20 year career as an application/LOB developer I have used (let alone had to reverse) a singularly linked list? I could probably count the usage on one hand, more than likely only at an interview and only because the interviewer wanted to show how clever he was. The reversal? Never. However, thanks to you, now I do, now, I can class myself as an expert programmer. So when I’m at my next interview (as that’s probably the only time I’ll ever actually need the code to reverse a linked list), I just need to refer to this article for the answer and I’m set.

I do agree, however, that having some basic computer science knowledge is useful, understanding pointers, a little bit of binary, how memory is used etc. is extremely powerful and useful background knowledge. As stated, though, I write LOB applications. Have been for many years and, hopefully for a few more years to come. I’ve been quite successful at it. I’m sure if I spent 2 days implementing my own custom sort algorithm my boss would be ecstatically happy and probably give me an instant pay rise because I can sort that list of customers I got out of the database in 50ns instead of the 60ns it would have taken had I just used Linq or ORDER BY in SQL, which, by the way, would have taken me a few seconds to implement and the remainder of the 2 days could have been spent on the remaining 50 features management had promised the client for the next release in a week’s time.

I think, what I am saying is, while this is all very nice to have this knowledge (and knowledge is always a good thing), it should always be kept in context and purely academic algorithmic code should not be used to differentiate programmers who can do it as a higher order. Oh and by the way, the two developers for the SEO company that I briefly worked for, didn’t have a clue how to create and set-up a WCF service, create and connect to a database, extract data from said database and resurface that data on the other side of the WCF service for a client application to consume. (but I bet they could have solved the linked list question posed). I didn’t consider them in a lesser order class of programmer because they didn’t know how to do that, but it annoyed me that they didn’t consider that programming as it was beneath them.

If you have any recommendations for books on the subject of computer science that I could learn from then I’ll be happy to read them. But I won’t necessarily agree that it will make me a better programmer or better at my job.”

when i shop usual raise my hand to the worker say ..could u do this for me..the beer it most like implies to the worker who hangs around the self-service to aid the customer and need to authorize alcohol when i shop…