The Whiteboard

7:02 PM

that certainly sounds more constructive than putting all of this directly into the on-topic page

still feels like putting too much effort into the stuff we know is a complete waste of our time

@Ixrec I see it more like doing what's reasonable. We can't say that we don't point people to the appropriate places to go.

Rachel

@ThomasOwens I didn't realize how long the list of related sites is

Thomas Owens

@Rachel Like I said, I grabbed every site that is somewhat related to software development, no matter how tangential.

Be lucky I didn't put Philosophy on that list.

Ixrec

SE didn't exactly plan the set of programming/technical sites they ended up with

...especially us

Thomas Owens

No, they didn't.

There's a mad amount of overlap.

Rachel

7:04 PM

:) as long as there's a dedicated group of users with a demand for Q&A on their chosen topic, seems good to me

I was trying to figure out the difference between Cross Validated and Data Science...

Thomas Owens

Honestly, I think my idea is that someone would hit that meta page and start CTRL-Fing for things they want.

Ixrec

U&L vs Ubuntu has always been the really big "how did that even happen?" one to me

I know there's some political nonsense surrounding it but still, it's kinda silly

Rachel

So do we even need an off-topic list in the on-topic page? I think it might still be worthwhile to mention Stack Overflow since it is such a common mistake

Thomas Owens

@Rachel Hm. Maybe not? Maybe get rid of that list and point to the meta question?

One sec.

Rachel

If you have a question about... then you might be in the right place! If you are still not sure, take a minute to check out our list of associated sites to see if your question would fit better on one of those sites.

Ixrec

7:07 PM

I would be happy with saying "no code debugging" and "no tool setup/troubleshooting"

those seem like the big ones that somebody might reasonably think falls under "Software X"

Aaron Hall

Ditto Ixrec

Ixrec

most of the other off-topic stuff is the sort of thing no one should ever be thinking of posting here post-name change

Aaron Hall

Does this mean we can call the site SESE?

Rachel

@AaronHall lol yes I suppose it does

essy-essy

Aaron Hall

Same url though?

Ixrec

7:09 PM

wasn't there a Software Engineering A51 proposal at some point?

Aaron Hall

or will we get a redirect?

Rachel

There's an actual SE site called "Engineering"

Ixrec

I still have no idea what's on topic there

Thomas Owens

Done.

@Ixrec Yes. It was mine.

Ixrec

oh

Thomas Owens

7:10 PM

Because I got fed up with Programmers being the wild west.

Ixrec

lol

Thomas Owens

Check out the wiki post in the name change question.

Robert Harvey

@Ixrec "Software Design and Architecture" is a wandering generality.

The way you get a sharply-focused scope is by being specific.

Ixrec

so is every other bullet point on everyone's list

Robert Harvey

Alright. But Testing and QA is not part of Software Design and Architecture. And I think that should stay. Most of the remaining bullet points are more or less mutually exclusive.

gnat

7:13 PM

good food for thought. Made me wonder how comes that Server Fault pages aren't littered with "my servelet dosent work, help". Based on site name, they should be a natural target for half askers blocked at Stack Overflow, "my server isnt work and this is site about server I ask here about server why cant I. why you close! confusing site name!!!" — gnat yesterday

Ixrec

@RobertHarvey are you talking about the site name or the on-topic list? we could bikeshed about both for weeks

Robert Harvey

I think most everyone agrees that the site name should probably be "Software Engineering."

Ixrec

I have yet to decide between Software Design/Architecture/Engineering/<two of the above> because I don't want to waste time on that argument and it's unlikely to make any meaningful difference compared to changing the name to anything other than programmers

Robert Harvey

Fair enough.

Ixrec

and frankly, I have absolutely no idea what "software engineering" means

Robert Harvey

7:16 PM

Software engineering

Software engineering is the application of engineering to the design, development, implementation and maintenance of software in a systematic method. Typical formal definitions of software engineering are: "research, design, develop, and test operating systems-level software, compilers, and network distribution software for medical, industrial, military, communications, aerospace, business, scientific, and general computing applications." "the systematic application of scientific and technological knowledge, methods, and experience to the design, implementation, testing, and documentation of software...

Ixrec

but I suspect Thomas is the only one who does

yeah, because wikipedia is so helpful at defining words that never had a clear definition

Robert Harvey

The point is that "Software Engineering" is not "Programmers," which smacks of "people who write teh codez."

2

Thomas Owens

@Ixrec I wanted Coffee McWhiskeyFace. But that was shot down.

Ixrec

exactly, whether or not what I do is "engineering" just doesn't matter if we can get rid of the off-topic junk

Robert Harvey

People who read teh licenzez. People who eat teh picklez.

Thomas Owens

7:18 PM

It pretty much describes my day.

Ixrec

I'm fairly sure I've never done anything that could reasonably be called engineering, nor are any of my answers on this site about what could be called engineering, but who the hell cares

Robert Harvey

No, but maybe you'd think twice about writing the nth question about a for loop on a site having "Engineer" in the name.

Ixrec

far more important is...yeah what you siad

the word has a connotation of "we know wtf we're doing" that is far more important than whatever the word actually means

gnat

@Ixrec just click delete here and here. Problem solved

Ixrec

@gnat Done. Why the hell didn't I do that earlier.

2

Robert Harvey

7:20 PM

@gnat Now they just need your delete votes.

Ixrec

we're too busy talking about site scope to go put more sandbags in front of the tidal wave

gnat

@RobertHarvey I'm outta votes today. But guess whose favorites are on these questions

Robert Harvey

How did I know you were going to say that.

Ixrec

somehow I also knew

mostly because they had 0 delete votes when I clicked on them

Thomas Owens

2

A: New Site Name and Scope Proposals

This answer is to summarize the requests for Stack Exchange in a single post. It is a community wiki, so if something else seems to be a consensus in this thread, feel free to add or edit it. Name Change to Software Engineering Tour / Tag Line Software Engineering Stack Exchange is a qu...

Look, ma! No list of things we're not about!

Ixrec

7:22 PM

also, I recently hit 3k over at SFF.SE, so I finally get to see what their review queues are like

it's...even emptier than I thought it would be

half the time I remember to check, it's all zeroes without my doing anything

right now it's all zeros except for 2 reopen queue items

one wonders if this is really what a "normal" or "healthy" SE site feels like

Rachel

@ThomasOwens Oh.....

Thomas Owens

-_-

Rachel

Should I roll back my edit? lol

Thomas Owens

Yeah. I thought it was really well done.

Without that second list.

"Here's what we're about. If you aren't sure, ask on meta. Or look at all these place to go to ask your questions."

Pretty slick.

Rachel

haha ok. We can always re-add our off-topic list if we start feeling we are stlil getting a lot of questions about a specific topic

Ixrec

7:25 PM

at the very least, I'd hope we get a reduction in the variety of off-topic junk so we can really cut it down to 2-3 things worthy of a bullet point there

and then, maybe, our canned off-topic reasons will actually cover all the common cases, instead of 30-40% of the common cases like they do now

Thomas Owens

@Ixrec Why not start fresh, though? We link to Wikipedia to define the things that are on-topic.

I'd be more than happy to edit some Wiki articles if that's necessary, too.

Ixrec

oh yes, that's exactly what I was arguing earlier, start empty and add later

Rachel

@ThomasOwens now you're getting way to ambitious for me...

Thomas Owens

Ah, ok.

Ixrec

we programmers are very good at agreeing with each other without realizing it

I'm not sure what that says about us

Rachel

7:26 PM

we're intelligent people who sometimes speak different languages or have different interpretations of things? :)

Thomas Owens

I violently agree with you. To the point where there are fisticuffs about agrement.

Ixrec

maybe it means "naming things is hard"

Aaron Hall

won't take yes for an answer

Thomas Owens

Between our name and that proposed /help/on-topic page, I can explain the site to someone in 1 minute. I can't do that today.

Rachel

\o/ hooray!

now I can go back to lurking ^_^

Ixrec

7:30 PM

I would hope you do more than just lurk

if anything we need more people like you joining in the moderation activities to balance out people like me

(I would say "us" but I'm basically the only "cabal" member left...)

(well I guess gnat counts)

Thomas Owens

OK. I'm going home. Have a good weekend, all. Be back on Tuesday.

gnat

10

Q: Add a 'ideal' or 'mission statement' to the help/on-topic

One of the most elegant descriptions of the scope of Programmers.SE came from Thomas Owens in chat: Picture Programmers like a small conference room with a whiteboard. No computer, no books, no papers. You write your question on the whiteboard and experts walk by. Someone sees one that they c...

Robert Harvey

I actually like @gnat's lone two bullets for the on-topic definition: "software architecture and design", and "software development methodologies and processes". If we're irrevocably locked into less than four bullets, I could live with just those two.

Ixrec

that's more or less what I was thinking of earlier when I said I had trouble even getting to 4

Thomas Owens

@RobertHarvey Eh...I'd prefer not to. But if we absolutely had to.

Ixrec

7:34 PM

I know there's stuff that's on-topic that some people care about that those two don't cover, but it's nothing I've ever cared about

Robert Harvey

S D L C

Ixrec

but cutting off one of Rachel's answer's bullet points would probably be better if we had to hit 4

Robert Harvey

She's at six right now.

Ixrec

it was five when I read it

gnat

1 hour ago, by gnat

@RobertHarvey if algorithms and data structures are not clearly implied by architecture and design then I also believe that these should be explicitly stated, I would want them to be firmly in site scope

^^^ algorithms and data structures probably have to be added too. When listing my two bullets I couldn't imagine that implication may be not 100% waterproof

Thomas Owens

7:36 PM

There. I just cut one off.

"software requirements, architecture, and design"- those are so closely linked anyway.

Now it's 5 bullets.

Ixrec

still struggling to see what "requirements" gives us but if it's one extra word in an existing bullet point then sure why not

Thomas Owens

Questions about user stories, software requirements specifications, requirements traceability...

Robert Harvey

Software Requirements
Software Architecture and Design
Development Methodologies and Processes
Quality Assurance and Testing

Thomas Owens

I still like having config, build, and release management. But I suppose I could live without it.

I'd want to see if we can make 5 stick.

Robert Harvey

You were right before. That's already covered in Development Methodologies and Processes.

Thomas Owens

7:39 PM

Not really.

Development methodologies and processes are thinks like extreme programming, Scrum, RUP, CMMI, Six Sigma, Lean...

Robert Harvey

No.

Thomas Owens

Yes, configuration management is a process. But design is also a process.

Robert Harvey

They're both development processes.

Ixrec

begin bikeshed:

Thomas Owens

Software development process

In software engineering, a software development methodology (also known as a system development methodology, software development life cycle, software development process, software process) is a splitting of software development work into distinct phases (or stages) containing activities with the intent of better planning and management. It is often considered a subset of the systems development life cycle. The methodology may include the pre-definition of specific deliverables and artifacts that are created and completed by a project team to develop or maintain an application. Common methodologies...

Robert Harvey

7:40 PM

Well, hell.

Thomas Owens

The only mention of configuration management is linking to a supporting disicpline in the sidebar. Technically, I think you're right. I'd rather make it a little more specific.

Robert Harvey

"And related technologies."

Thomas Owens

I kind of like the questions about continuous integration, continuous deployment, etc

@RobertHarvey Where's that from?

Robert Harvey

I just made it up.

Thomas Owens

I don't know. I almost want to go to SE with what we have now.

Ixrec

7:42 PM

there's certainly not much to improve on there

Thomas Owens

If they say "thou shalt have 4 bullet points and no more", the configuration management line can go.

Ixrec

and what really matters is what ordinary newbies think is on or off topic when they see our site, not whether it makes the list

Robert Harvey

You mean Rachel's six?

Thomas Owens

@RobertHarvey It's 5 now.

Robert Harvey

Oy.

gnat

7:43 PM

@ThomasOwens by the way your picture suggests that requirements are covered by the process bullet. I wouldn't mind them stated explicitly but if powers that be will twist our hands to cut the list, this will be worth keeping in mind

Aaron Hall

I can't count as cabal?

Robert Harvey

Goddammit. What happened to "Data Structures and Algorithms?"

Thomas Owens

@RobertHarvey It's gone?

No it's not.

It's there.

2

A: New Site Name and Scope Proposals

This answer is to summarize the requests for Stack Exchange in a single post. It is a community wiki, so if something else seems to be a consensus in this thread, feel free to add or edit it. Name Change to Software Engineering Tour / Tag Line Software Engineering Stack Exchange is a qu...

Ixrec

oh cool I got a tag badge

Robert Harvey

Oh. Rachel has two answers.

Aaron Hall

7:45 PM

Ha, you can't go to SE until we've discussed this thoroughly & redundantly and gotten broad exposure to all stakeholders. :D

looks fondly at his rubber stamp

Robert Harvey

@ThomasOwens You guys are playing fast and loose with your terms. What is a "software process?" And what happened to Testing and QA?

Ixrec

@AaronHall you're too recent and not active enough in the meta fights to be a cabal member =)

not that there ever actually was a cabal

gnat

@AaronHall only 47 flags, not enough for cabal. Illuminati require at least 666 posts voted or flagged to close

Ixrec

holy crap you made a lot of comments on the 3-way boolean question

Thomas Owens

@RobertHarvey A software process (which is the same as a methodology or life cycle) is the set of steps or activities that go into a software project.

Aaron Hall

7:47 PM

:D

Rachel

@ThomasOwens I thought you were going home :p

Thomas Owens

@Rachel You guys distracted me.

Ixrec

deep down he secretly cares about the site

Rachel

@ThomasOwens I hate it when that happens... I always get in trouble for coming home late too :p

gnat

@Evan it's about we stop pretending that we discuss QA topics as true testers would. I am an ex-tester and QA stuff I've seen here is... softly speaking not at the best level from QA engineer perspective. As a part of development lifecycle it's good enough but not as a part of a discourse focused primarily on QA. I rarely visit QA.SE but what I see there, is so much better fit. About time to stop hijacking topics that are better covered at other SE sites — gnat May 24 at 18:12

^^^ seriously, we don't offer more on testing than is implied by SDLC

"from developers perspective" (not a tester's one)

Robert Harvey

7:49 PM

We have a QA site, don't we? How is it going there? Do they discuss things like TDD?

gnat

@RobertHarvey no matter if they do or not, TDD should have firm place in here. It ends wit "development" after all. And it's 200% fits within methodologies and processes

Aaron Hall

How about BDD?

DDD?

Ixrec

<letter>DD will always be relevant to software design/architecture/engineering/<bikeshed>

Aaron Hall

Can I still downvote it?

Ixrec

but that doesn't mean we need a separate bullet point for "QA"

in fact doesn't TDD have nothing to do with QA? QA happens after development

@AaronHall only if it's bad

Aaron Hall

7:52 PM

What if it's good and I just don't like it?

Ixrec

ignore it

Aaron Hall

:/

Just being silly, sorry. :D

gnat

@AaronHall same. And by the way true testers should clearly realize that TDD and BDD are foreign concepts. Related, useful to know but still. Black box testing is native to QA, everything else is what developers try to trick them doing if they lack resources or are too lazy

Robert Harvey

Would it be fair to say that the site is mostly about SDLC?

Aaron Hall

shifts frame reference...

mind blown

gnat

7:54 PM

SDLC and algorithms / data structures

Ixrec

to me SDLC implies stuff that doesn't happen in my IDE, while deciding whether an object should have this or that method or be known to this layer of code does happen in my IDE

but that's bikeshedding

Aaron Hall

SDLC.SE.com

Robert Harvey

OK, I got it down to four.

Ixrec

and now Ana enters the chatroom and tells us it wasn't meant literally

Robert Harvey

You can ask Software Engineering questions *directly related to the Software Development Life Cycle,* including:

 - Software Requirements Engineering
 - Software Architecture and Design
 - Algorithms and Data Structures
 - Software Development Methods and Practices

It doesn't have to be an all-inclusive list. It just has to be illustrative.

"What we're not" is far more important.

Rachel

8:06 PM

"software configuration, build and release management" included anywhere in that?

Robert Harvey

Yeah, I think that's probably a fifth bullet.

Aaron Hall

I think that's subsumed in the 4th bullet

Robert Harvey

Well, a "software development process" is Scrum or Waterfall.

Aaron Hall

Make the 4th bullet SDLC and all good.

:)

Robert Harvey

It already says that in the preamble.

Aaron Hall

8:14 PM

ok, then subsumed in the 4th bullet.

schemes to ask Troll question about agile waterfalls

Robert Harvey

The one thing that I don't want is for people to read "Software Development Methods" as "what's the best way to write a for loop?"

So I put a couple of examples on that one.

Aaron Hall

wind whispers in the trees

But I want to run an Agile project.

GlenPeterson

9:12 PM

@RobertHarvey Surely your C# IDE highlights errors as you type? I mean, if you try to divide two Strings instead of two Integers?

Robert Harvey

Sure, but it won't tell me when I've failed to properly parameterize my SQL parameters. It will happily let me concatenate bare strings all day long.

And as smart as the C# compiler is, I doubt it's smart enough to suss that out.

Ixrec

therefore...ORMs win?

Robert Harvey

Have you ever actually tried to build an ORM? There's enough dissonance between SQL types and object types to make it an enormous pain in the ass.

Ixrec

I have not, nor have I ever understood why everyone wants one

we just write parameterized SQL statements and move on

Robert Harvey

Well, that's one reason. You get some sanitization for free.

GlenPeterson

9:16 PM

@RobertHarvey bare strings aren't the problem because, as you say, the developer writes them as you say. However, if you have a User object and a User table in your database, you will ultimately let the user write in their name. When you get this off the Request object, you wrap it: Tainted(request.getParam("lastName")). You don't let it exist as an unguarded String object for longer than that.

Robert Harvey

Naturally. But the language doesn't take care of that. Something else does, a library, whatever. It usually gets caught at run time.

@Ixrec Where I work now, we also write SQL statements by hand. I think there's a large move in our industry towards basic nuts and bolts programming. There have been too many overblown, bombastic libraries and frameworks that have made too many unkept promises over the years.

GlenPeterson

@RobertHarvey and that's why 2 of the top 3 OWASP vulnerabilities are because of this.

Ixrec

because of people who don't know that parameterized queries exist?

Robert Harvey

@GlenPeterson Tell me more about your Java IDE. You're saying that it will tell you when you've typed a vulnerable piece of code? That's quite an achievement.

GlenPeterson

So you're saying the best you can do is:

String toString() { throw UnsupportedOperationException("Tried to write out Tainted data!"); }

Robert Harvey

9:21 PM

toString is runtime, so that won't even work.

GlenPeterson

@RobertHarvey this is getting much more complicated that it should ever be. There was a time when all String concatenation in Java was a real performance problem. So we just didn't do it. IntelliJ IDEA would warn, "String concatenation" then later it would warn, "String concatenation in a loop" which it still does. I made an HtmlWriter class that had methods: .p(Integer i), .p(Boolean b) and .p(String s) which, if all your unsafe data were in Tainted wrappers, would not accept that data.

@RobertHarvey I could swear this worked at one point, but by the time I developed it, we had a few hundred thousand lines of code at work and there was no way to convert that much code. It ends up looking like:
o.p("<input type=\"text\" value=\").pHtml(firstName).p("\" name=\"firstName\" >");

@RobertHarvey pHtml() takes a Tainted, while p() takes a String.

@RobertHarvey Now I'm doubting myself and wondering if I'm just confused and it never actually worked.

@RobertHarvey oh, and pHtml escapes the Tainted to make it valid HTML.

Robert Harvey

You don't need a special type system to write a safe HtmlWriter class. You just sanitize all the strings or reject the ones you don't like.

And you confine the problem to the place where it really is a problem.

GlenPeterson

@RobertHarvey You have to not sanitize this part o.p("<input type=\"text\" value=\")

@RobertHarvey If you sanitized it, the HTML would become: "<input type="text&quot value=&quot" which is no longer a valid input tag. I mean, it would look to the end-user like the code for an input tag, but it wouldn't look like a text field.

GlenPeterson

9:49 PM

@RobertHarvey Two more points. 1. Lift Web: liftweb.net/index escapes all input from the user as HTML, which is problematic because sometimes it needs to be used in a URL for a forward, or written to a PDF file or something. Ideally, user supplied data should be stored Tainted in the database and escaped on Output not Input.

@RobertHarvey I think you probably could have fooled the IDE by using string concatenation. Yes, I'm probably somewhat confused. But I still have a point. I was inspired by Joel on Software "Make Wrong Look Wrong" joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html and it did a really good job of that, even if the IDE and compiler could only detect some and not all of the errors. I'll update my question. Thanks for your feedback.

Robert Harvey

No problem.

Robert Harvey

10:02 PM

thanks for making my question more 美 — Eva 31 secs ago

[sigh]

Still not capitalizing.