Why Software Quality Disappeared: Culture

In response to The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe:

This blog post is close to the right idea but not completely.

Yes, it is bad that a calculator is leaking RAM. And yes, AI development will likely increase the number of cases where similar consequential issues arise.

AI isn’t the reason that the calculator was leaking so much memory. Nor were cost of abstraction related to the calculator issue.

The real issue is that the software ethos of ‘Move fast and break things’ and ‘Ship early. Ship often’ has finally caught up with the software world. Which is how the calculator ended up leaking 32GB of RAM, how CrowdStrike managed to have a big outage, and how Android 15 shipped with so many bugs. Not abstraction, not AI development, but culture.

Unfortunately, software ‘quality’ is something that is hard to measure. What means quality? Ease of use, visual appearance, performance, program requirements? While we may not all agree on the definitions we can definitely ‘feel’ when software quality goes down.

As a German language speaker, I use a lot of my devices in German. I remember when each major OS release from Apple, Google, and Microsoft had months long QC processes for translations. It seems that over the last 10 years these processes have gone down in scope. Google, in Android 15, shipped the clock app with buttons that can’t handle longer text, say ‘Schlafzeit’ instead of ‘Bedtime’.

I do agree with the initial author that software does have limits. The problem that we’ve been dealing with as a software industry is that Moore’s Law has been letting us get away with more and more gluttony. Many universities are switching their main computer science programs away from C/C++ to python in an effort to make computing more accessible. This unfortunately leaves those future engineers unable to deal with an environment where computers are not getting significantly faster year over year anymore. You can’t get away with writing a semi-efficient program and just wait a year or two for the computer to run it 2-4x faster.

Luckily, we haven’t accepted leaking 32GB is normal for a calculator. So there is some hope.