Oh yeah? Then explain dogfooding.
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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How are you producing animals then?
Pretty sure humans are animals too
Testing in production rules actually. Use feature flags and monitoring and you're all good
Tags also work well; it's how I've been making hot fixes for that last 3 years. Lol
Banana Software: Ripens at the customer.
Testing medicines on humans is basically testing in production
I test drugs on my (production) system!
Would be more apt if animals' physiology was even remotely similar to humans though. Test environments in programming can at least be exact replicas of production environments.
But but it worked on my machine
In 2004, the FDA estimated that 92 percent of drugs that pass preclinical tests, including “pivotal” animal tests, fail to proceed to the market.More recent analysis suggests that, despite efforts to improve the predictability of animal testing, the failure rate has actually increased and is now closer to 96 percent
That's actually really good to hear. It really sucks that the animal component is almost pointless, and it seems to be more unethical to include them in the testing process, but it's good to hear that at least the safety guardrails were working in the past.
Seems we just need to rethink how to ethically test on humans from the start, though I worry about letting the current people in charge execute that plan.
Hopefully it also means animal testing isn't actually that important and can be easily phased out for alternatives.
The good news is that some progress has been made in the US. The semi-recent (2022) FDA modernization act 2.0 removes mandates for animal testing in law and allows other testing methods to be used instead
There's another bill (FDA modernization act 3.0) that was just reintroduced a few days ago to not just allow the FDA to use non-animal testing, but to require that the FDA start actually working to allow it and setup pathways, rules, requirements, etc. And prioritize the review of drugs done via approved non-animal testing
It includes various reporting, safety, etc. requirements laid out so it wouldn't just be handing it blindly to the current admin
The 2.0 act was suprisingly bipartisan, so it's not a given that the 3.0 act would be doomed. Call your house representative and senators to make sure it gets through!
Most test animals have a great deal of similarities to humans, white mice specifically.
If they are so similiar, why is it ok to treat them so much worse?
Because they're small, smaller than short people
Do you think they just grab a random kitten and shove drugs up its bum until it bursts?
There's actual medication that was tested on animals that was completely fine then when it got approved it was given to human women and caused crazy amounts of miscarriages. Different species are not comparable when it comes to medication, testing on animals is almost completely pointless.
Yes they're not the same. Do you think scientist are unaware of that? It is most certainly not almost completely pointless. Are you?
You'd be surprised how stubborn some people can be in keeping with older ways of doing things, even more so in academia and the like.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear
It sometimes feels as if the medical and scientific knowledge of people who are hardline against animal testing at all is exactly that and only that thinking, yes.
Good that we have a steady supplie of shitty people then :-)
Paraphrased: everyone has a production environment, if you’re lucky you have a test environment too.
We have a test environment but it's a hot mess. All the data is made up and extremely low quality. All the things you would normally interface with are also in test, but getting other teams to coordinate testing in the test space is... a chore. We do the best we can with mock services, but without having real services or representative data some of the data pattern assumptions don't play out. Leaders value writing code and our lack of architects that span teams mean that when team architects either don't meet ahead of time, make assumptions, or don't ever agree on a design then...
We always host UAT. We also track logins. Guess how many users even show up for UAT, let alone actually click on anything.
This is why the vast majority of our testing happens in prod when our users are doing real work.
Sorry for the baby rant :)
Not entirely true... If you write libraries for other developers you can use them as beta testers. Your customers have a production environment, but you don't. At least, that's what one of our vendors seems to think...
Thanks for my new teams pfp
Can't say I recommend
Okay but how would you even teast software on animals?
Same way we test everything else on animals. It all starts with the mice.
Some say the mice are testing us (Douglas Adams)
Cat walking across the keyboard
Looking at the error reports and the user input logs, a rabbit couldn't do worse...
This is a real incident ticket I saw:
Subject: "broken" Description: "website down"
Given that the website was in fact not down, and they included no details, and they must have been filing it on behalf of someone else as their user-id didn't have an account at all (it is an internal corporate product), this was a real head scratcher.
Yeah, error reports seem to be some esoteric concept for some people...
I'm obviously doing the IT stuff for my family (although in the last years, I got out by saying, I'm doing Linux exclusively). So once I got a hysterical call, that the laptop is dead and nothing is working anymore.
So stupid me rushed over, just to find out that they just couldn't receive emails, because their provider had a problem.
In my book, if a laptop is dead, there isn't anything on the screen anymore - best case some BIOS stuff is happening.
I started to switch people over to Linux, at least the next generation and my near surroundings, and decline now most things on windows (or smartphones), because I officially haven't worked with those operating systems since years, and all I do is just searching around and reading things, they could've done themselves, if they wouldn't be too lazy to read.
I'm all open for people who are lost and need help, but then they mustn't treat me like a fucking employee. I'm here to help you to solve your problems next time yourself, else my work here has no point.
If a monkey can use it, everyone can?
Yeah right. The idiom is a thousand monkeys with typewriters could eventually produce the entire works of Shakespeare, not end users.
motion sensor activated gun
The Matrix?
I want this sticker
My company needs a new sign to hang outside on the building. Let me see if I can get this past the head of marketing...
We've solved ethics. Pack it up everyone
Always test in production!
Extra environments cost money. Testers cost money. Users pay to use your software and test it for free!
I'm thankful you're not my PM.