What to reply to a non-programmer who thinks that testing is unnecessary or secondary

At some point during his or her career, a programmer might come across the following argument, presented by some colleague, partner, or decision maker:

Since we can always test our software by hand, we do not need to implement Automated Software Testing.

Apparently, I reached that point in my career, so now I need to debate this argument. I decided to be a good internet citizen and publish my thoughts. So, in this post I am going to be deconstructing that argument, and demolishing it from every angle that it can be examined. I will be doing so using language that is easy to process by people from outside of our discipline.

In this post I am documenting sightings of these red heart stickers.

If anyone knows what these are, who sticks them, what for, please do let me know.

If you try visiting The Pirate Bay from Holland nowadays, you are very likely to be disappointed. Your internet provider will most probably block your access with a page like this: https://blocked.t-mobilethuis.nl/

This is, of course, completely unacceptable.

But while we are sitting around wondering when the revolution will start so that we can round up all those responsible for this situation and send them to the forced labor camps, it would be nice if we had some means of bypassing the block.

Here is how:

Right out of the box, an Ubuntu 18.04 machine will not see any Microsoft Windows machines on the network, and Windows machines will not see it. Unfortunately, there is an incredible amount of work necessary to get it to work properly. So, here are my notes on setting up an Ubuntu 18.04 Linux workstation to act both as a Samba server and as a Samba client in a Windows Workgroup.

Server

I have been researching clipboard managers for Linux, (Ubuntu with Gnome,) and I am recording my findings here for the benefit of others.

This is an article I enjoyed reading. I am in full agreement with every claim made therein. It was very nice to see certain conclusions that I have arrived at in the past being spelled out and illustrated with nice explanations.

https://medium.com/@egonelbre/psychology-of-code-readability-d23b1ff1258a

Old comments

• gmc 2019-09-16 19:05:24 UTC

  About naming, this is a brilliant podcast on the subject that i think should be required listening for any sw engineer: https://www.se-radio.net/2016/12/se-radio-episode-278-peter-hilton-on-naming/

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