I had played with UCBLogo for two weeks and hadn’t made it crash once. Brian brought the whole thing down in three commands. The most telling part is that when I tried to reproduce the defect a week later I couldn’t. I issued rt with a ton of 9s and just couldn’t get it to break. As it turns, it only crashes when you omit the space, which of course I didn’t think of doing. It took me more time to reproduce the defect than it took Brian to discover it.
Posted by Allen Hutchison, Engineering Manager
Regardless of the amount of testing you do for an application, if the application doesn't scale, there is a good chance that no one will ever see it. As you can imagine, we at Google care a lot about scalability. In fact, it's rare to talk to another Googler about a new idea without the question, "How does it scale?" coming into the discussion. On June 23, our Seattle office will host a conference on scalable systems.
The team is currently accepting proposals for 45-minute talks. You can find out more from the Google Research Blog.
In software as in life there are things we notice that help confirm whether something is satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Let's call these things that affect our judgment of the results "factors." Some factors provide stronger indications than others. When using these factors to rate results, we will assign higher scores (or "weightings") to the stronger indicators. By assigning higher weightings to the stronger indicators, we enable these to have a stronger influence on the overall outcome.
