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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

Professionalism, in my opinion, includes taking reasonable precautions to prevent the problem from happening.

If you are professional you know what kind of potential problems might happen and you know what are reasonable possible approaches to handle it.

If security of your piece of software relies on default values of some settings I would reasonably expect you to have automated tests to verify that these settings have correct values.

Next time you hire an electrician who causes damage to your house because he did not follow procedure to wire it correctly, will you be still calling him "professional" because he quickly removed the short?

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Everyone makes mistakes. Its how you handle and rectify those mistakes which defines you.

I very much disagree.

Yes -- it is important how you rectify those mistakes.

But being quick at rectifying mistakes does not yet make your actions professional.

Expectations of professionalism, software quality, process, and so on are all a matter of context. I'm not sure a FOSS web framework gets DQed for a quickly-rectified mistake. The expectations aren't that high and can't be that high.

I agree with you, but open source software is given as-is, in any context, if you see the headers and/or README files and/or LICENSE files, it says that there is no warranty given and considering that the whole (tech) world sustains itself on stealing the work of volounteers, I would reply that if a piece of software is not professional, then invest to make some professional work that works for you

> I agree with you, but open source software is given as-is, in any context,

But if you are calling somebody or something "professional" what you are saying is they act as if they were doing it in a certain way. If they don't follow the practices it does not matter if they are doing it for free.

It is like saying a kid is doing something professionally (even if he is not) and argumenting that it is because he isn't paid for it.

I think symfony developers are still good professionals, given the size of the project and the amount of contributors, having an error or not having a test case for something specific could be forgiven, I would reply that errors and bugs can slip in a codebase, I guess it's more important to create a test case to double check that a bug doesn't re-appear in the future after it has been fixed?

I mean I fail to understand what are you trying to say, someone stops being a professional as soon as it hasn't covered a test case?

Or are they kids just for having slipped a bug? Despite their work powers a lot of companies software (including the ones I work for)

Are you just trolling?

The statement was that they acted professionally.

I don't know if they are or are not professionals.

It is just my opinion that being nice and prompt about removing cause of the damage after they have caused damage through recklessly ignoring industry standards cannot be reason to call their entire set of actions around this particular issue as "professional".

FYI, the GP comment said "The issue was resolved/disclosed very quickly, and in a professional manor."

So they didn't say their "entire set of actions" was "professional" just that it was disclosed and resolved professionally.

It shows lack of experience to suggest having a gap in testing is somehow "recklessly ignoring industry standards". If you look at Symfony's test suite it's clear that they take testing extremely seriously and keep their tests up to date in a way that's far superior to my experience with "industry standard". If you look at the fix for this issue which is linked from the OP you'd see that the first thing they did is add a unit test to prevent this kind of issue from happening again.

If you consider that kind of behavior recklessly unprofessional I'd be amazed to see the kind of tests you write for your code.

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