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Comment by scblock | Hacker News Reader

"Software development is hard. Adobe's software is incredibly complex. Sure this sucks, but it's worth keeping that in mind before blasting Adobe."

That's a joke, right? Software development is hard, but this kind of mistake is indefensible.

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Not in today's Agile world.

Really the problem is just there wasn't a user story saying:

  As a user having a directory .AAAAA 
  When I run an Adobe application 
  The directory should still be there

Also, the computer should not spontaneously combust. And it shouldn't try to bite my hand off. And it shouldn't morph into a soul-devouring monstrosity either. In other words, there is an infinite list of things that your/my/any program shouldn't cause. Good luck making user stories for all of them.

This so much.

If your Agile developers follow user stories to the exclusion of common sense, you should probably fire them now.

I'm fairly certain the parent post was made in jest.

Me too; hence the absurd examples :)

Sounds funny, but you are sadly correct. Some junior (or even an experienced) dev just took the shortest route to delete the file that was always listed first on their computer. `deleteFile(files[0]);`

Even just trying to figure out how this bug could even be introduced baffles me, and I've been able to correctly determine the cause of some very odd bugs before (including this one from Adobe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797640 )

It reminds me of this quote:

"There are two ways to develop software: Make it so simple that there are obviously no bugs, or so complex that there are no obvious bugs." - Tony Hoare

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