Reading Mark Gardner's latest post on what's "coming soon" regarding OO and perl has made me actually think for once about objects, which I generally try to avoid. I've posted a few times before that about the only thing I want regarding a new object model is for P5P to make up it's mind already. I didn't exactly have a concrete pain point to give me cause to say "gimme" now. Ask, and ye shall receive.

I recently had an issue come down the pipe at playwright-perl. For those of you not familiar, I designed the module for ease of maintenance. The way this was accomplished is to parse a spec document, and then build the classes dynamically using Sub::Install. The significant wrinkle here is that I chose to have the playwright server provide this specification. This means that it was more practical to simply move this class/method creation to runtime rather than in a BEGIN block. Running subprocesses in BEGIN blocks is not usually something I would consider (recovered memory of ritual abuse at the hands of perlcc).

Anyways, I have a couple of options to fix the reporter's inability to subclass/wrap the Playwright child classes:

• Run the subprocess in BEGIN to grab the spec from the playwright_server
• install all the Moo stuff with Sub::Install as well
• Throw in the towel on runtime meta and rely on compile-time code generation

On the other hand, if we had a good "default mop" like Mark discusses, this would be a non-issue given we'd already get everything we want out of bless (or the successor equivalent). It made me realize that we could have our cake and eat it in this regard by just having a third argument to bless (what MOP to use).

perl being what it is though, I am sure there are people who are in "bless is bad and should go away" gang. In which case all I can ask is that whatever comes along accommodates the sort of crazed runtime shenanigans that make me enjoy using perl. In the meantime I'm going back to compile-time metaprogramming.

Over the years I've had discussions over the merit of various forms of dependency resolution and people tend to fall firmly into one camp or the other. I have found what is best is very much dependent on the situation; dogmatic adherence to one model or another will eventually handicap you as a programmer. Today I ran into yet another example of this in the normal course of maintaining playwright-perl.

For those of you unfamiliar, there are two major types of dependency resolution:

Dynamic Linking: Everything uses global deps unless explicitly overridden with something like LD_LIBRARY_PATH at runtime. This has security and robustness implications as it means the program author has no control over the libraries used to build their program. That said, it results in the smallest size of shipped programs and is the most efficient way to share memory among programs. Given both these resources were scarce in the past, this became the dominant paradigm over the years. As such it is still the norm when using systems programming languages (save for some OSes and utilities which prefer static linking).

Static Linking: essentially a fat-packing of all dependencies into your binary (or library). The author (actually whoever compiles it) has full control over the version of bundled dependencies. This is highly wasteful of both memory and disk space, but has the benefit of working on anything which can run its' binaries. The security concern here is baking in obsolete and vulnerable dependencies. Examples of this approach would be most vendor install mechanisms, such as npm, java jars and many others. This has become popular as of late due to it being simplest to deploy. Bootstrapping programs are almost always using this technique.

There is yet another way, and this is to "have our cake and eat it too" approach most well known in windows DLLs. You can have shared libraries which expose every version ever shipped such that applications can have the same kind of simple deploys as with static linking. The memory tradeoffs here are not terrible, as only the versions used are loaded into memory, but you pay the worst disk cost possible. Modern packaging systems get around this by simply keeping the needed versions online, to be downloaded upon demand.

Anyways, perl is a product of it's time and as such takes the Dynamic approach by default, which is to install copies of its' libraries system-wide. That said, it's kept up with the times so vendor installs are possible now with most modules which do not write their makefiles manually. Anyhow, this results in complications when you have multi-programming language projects, such as playwright-perl.

Playwright is a web automation toolkit written in node.js, and so we will have to do some level of validation to ensure our node kit is correct before the perl interface can work. This is further complicated by the fact that playwright also has other dependencies on both browsers and OS packages which must be installed.

Normally in a node project you could use webpack to fat-pack (statically link) to all your dependencies. That said, packing entire browser binaries is a bridge too far, so we either have to instruct the user properly or install everything for them. As is usual with my projects, I bit off a bit more than I can chew trying to be good to users, and made attempts to install the dependencies for them. Needless to say, I have ceased doing so.  Looking back, this willingness to please has caused more of my bugs than any other. Yet again the unix philosophy wins; do one thing, do it well. This is also a big reason why dynamic linking won -- it makes a lot of things "not your problem". Resolving dependencies and installing them are two entirely separate categories of problem, and a program only has to solve one to run.

The long-term solution here is to wait until playwright can be shipped as an OS package, as many perl libraries are nowadays. It's interesting that playwright itself made an install-deps subcommand. I hope this means that is in the cards soon, as that's most of the heavy lifting for building OS packages.

The way software testing as a job is formally described is to provide information to decisionmakers so that they can make better decisions. Testers are fundamentally adversarial as they are essentially an auditor sent by management to evaluate whether the product an internal team produces is worth buying.

Things don't usually work out this way. The job is actually quite different in practice from it's (aspirational) self-image. It turns out that the reason testers are not paid well and generally looked down upon in the industry is because of this reality. This is due primarily to the organizational realities of the modern corporation, and is reinforced by various macroeconomic and policy factors. Most of these situational realities are ultimately caused by deeply ingrained emotional needs of our species.

Testing at arm's length: wring this neck

Adversarial processes are not morally or ethically wrong. It is in fact quite useful to take an adversarial approach. For example, AI researchers have found that the only reliable process to distinguish lies from truth in a dataset is precisely through adversarial procedure. However, the usefulness of an adversarial approach is compromised when a conflict of interests exists. This is why Judges recuse themselves from trials in which they even have the appearance of outcome dependence in.

Herein lies the rub. Modern software firms tend to be a paranoid lot, as their (generally untalented and ignorant) management don't understand their software is in no way unique. They seem to act like gluing together 80% open source components is somehow innovation rather than obvious ideas with good marketing. In any case, because of this paranoia they don't want to expose their pile of "innovation" and it's associated dirty laundry to the general public via leaks and so forth. They mistakenly believe that they can secure this most reliably with direct employment of testers rather than being careful with their contractors.

This forgets that the individual employee usually has nothing whatsoever that could be meaningfully recovered in the event of such a breach, and is practically never bonded against this. On the other hand, a contracting business stakes everything on their professionalism and adherence to contract and have far more to lose than a tester paid peanuts. This lead me to the inescapable conclusion: The incentives encouraged for the vast majority of employed testers are the opposite of what is required to achieve the QA mission.

It turns out this happens for the same reason that Judges (paid by the state) don't recuse them from judgement in cases wheir their employer is the defendant or prosecutor. Because the job is not actually what it is claimed to be.

But wait! There's more conflicts of interest!

As if to rub this cognitive dissonance further in the face of the tester, modern organizations tend to break into "teams" and adopt methodologies such as scrum to tightly integrate the product lifecycle. Which means you as a tester now have to show solidarity and be a team player who builds others up instead of tearing down their work. To not do so is to risk being considered toxic.

The only way to actually do this is to prevent issues before they happen, which to be entirely fair is the cheapest point to do so. The problem of course with this is that it means in practice the programmer is basically doing Extreme Programming and riding shotgun with a tester. If the tester actually can do this without making the programmer want to strangle them, this means the tester has to understand programming quite well themselves. Which begs the question as to why they are wasting time making peanuts testing software instead of writing execrable piles of it. I've been there, and chose to write and make more every single time.

How dare you call my baby ugly: Testers are bad people

Everyone who remains a tester but not programmer is forced to wait until code is committed and pushed to begin testing. At that point it's too late from an emotional point of view; it's literally in the word -- commitment means they've emotionally invested in the code. So now the tester is the "bad guy" slipping schedule and being a cost center rather than the helper of the team. That is, unless the tester does something other than invalidate (mistaken) assumptions about the work product's fitness for purpose. Namely, they start validating the work product (and the team members personally by extension), emphasizing what passed rather than failed.

This is only the beginning of the emotional nonsense getting in the way of proper testing. Regardless of whether the customer wants "Mr. Right" or "Mr. Right Now", firms and their employees tend to have an aspirational self-image that they are making the best widget. The customer's reality is usually some variant of "yeah, it's junk but it does X I want at the price I want and nobody else does". I can count on one hand the software packages that I can say without qualification are superior to their competition, and chances are good that "you ain't it".

Neverthless, this results in a level of "Quality theatre" where a great deal more scrutiny and rigor is requested than is required for proper and prompt decisionmaking. This is not opposed by most QAs, as they don't see beyond their own corn-pone. However, this means that some things which require greater scrutiny will not recieve them, as resources are scarce.

We don't make mistakes, we R SMRRT

Many testers also fall into this validation trap, and provide details which management regards as unimportant (but that the tester considers important). This causes managers to tune out, helping no one. This gets especially pernicious when dealing with those incapable of understanding second and third order effects, especially when these may lead to material harm to customers. When time is a critical factor it can be extremely frustrating to explain such things to people. So much so that sometimes you just gotta say It's got electrolytes.

Sometimes the business model depends on the management not understanding such harms. At some point you will have to decide whether your professional dignity is more important than your corn pone, as touching such topics is a third rail I and others have been fried on. I always choose dignity for the simple reason that customers who expose themselves to such harms willingly tend to be ignorant. Stupid customers don't have any money.

It's all these emotional pitfalls that explain why testers still cling to the description of their job as providing actionable information to decisionmakers. The only way to maintain your professional dignity in an environment where you can do everything right but still have it all go wrong is to divorce yourself from outcomes. Pearl divers don't really care if they sell to swine, you know?

Business analysis sounds boring, surely we don't need a specialist

Speaking of things outside of your control and higher-order effects, there are also market realities which must guide the tester as to what decisionmakers want to know, but will never tell you to look for. Traditionally this was done by business analysts who would analyze the competitve landscape in cooperation with testers, but that sounds a bit too IBM to most people so they don't do it. As such this is yet another task which it turns out you as a tester have to do more often than not. It is because of this that I developed a keen interest in business analysis and Economics.

The Iron Law of Project Management states that you have to pick two of three from:

• Do it fast
• Do it cheap
• Do it well

That said the people who want to hire testers are looking to transition from fast/cheap to fast/well by throwing money at the problem. This tends to run into trouble in practice, as many firms transition into competing based on quality too early, eating the margins beyond what the market and investors will bear.

If I have to think like a businessman and a customer, why am I a salaryman?

The primary reasons for these malinvestments are interest rate suppression and corrupt units of account being the norm in developed economies. This sends false signals to management as to the desirability of investing in quality, which are then reinforced by the emotional factors mentioned earlier. Something will have to give eventually in such a situation and by and large it's been tester salaries, as with all other jobs that are amenable to outsourcing to low-cost jurisdictions. Many times firms have a bad experience outsourcing, and this is because they don't transfer product and business expertise to the testers they contract with first. There is no magic bullet there, it's gotta be sour mash to some degree. Expertise and tradition take people and time to build.

Also, price is subjective and it's discovery is in many ways a mystical experience clouded by incomplete knowledge in the first place. It should be unsurprising that prices are subjective given quality itself is an ordinal and not cardinal concept. The primary means by which price is discovered is customer evaluation of a product and its seller's qualitative attributes versus how much both parties value the payment.

This ultimately means that to be an effective tester, you have to think like the customer and the entrepeneur. Being able to see an issue from multiple perspectives is very important to writing useful reports. This is yet another reason to avoid getting "too friendly with the natives" in your software development organization.

Behold the tester, high guardian of the brand

Speaking of mystical experiences, why do we care about quality at all? Quality is an important component of a brand's prestige, which is the primary subjective evaluation criteria for products. Many times there are sub-optimal things which can be done right, but only at prohibitive costs. Only luxury brands even dare to attempt these things.

Those of us mere mortals will have to settle for magic. In the field of Carpentry there's an old adage "If you can't conceal it, reveal it. Perfect joinery of trim to things like doorframes is not actually possible because wood doesn't work that way. So instead you offset it a bit. This allows light and shadow to play off it, turning a defect into decoration.

The best way to describe this in software terms is the load bearing bug. Any time you touch things for which customer expectations have solidified, even to fix something bad, expect to actually make it worse. This is because nobody ever reads change logs, much less writes them correctly. You generally end up in situations where data loss happens because something which used to hold up the process at a pain point has now been shaved off without the mitigant being updated. Many times this just means an error now sails through totally undetected, causing damage.

These higher-order effects mean in general that "fixing it" is many times not the right answer. Like with carpentry you have to figure out a way to build atop a flawed reality to result in a better finished product. This eventually results in large inefficiencies in software ecosystems and is a necessary business reality. The only way to avoid this requires great care and cleverness with design which many times is simply not feasible in the time allotted.

Assisting in the identification of these sort of factors is a large part of "finding bugs before they happen" especially in the maintenance cycle. It's also key to the brand, as quality is really just a proxy for competence. Pushing fixes that break other things does not build such a reputation, and should not be recommended save in the situation where data loss and damage is the alternative.

The only way to actually have this competence is to not have high turnover in your test and development department. Unfortunately, the going rate for testers makes the likelihood that skilled testers stick around quite low.

Process versus Mission driven organizations: Are we clear to go to public?

I have spoken at length about the difference between Process and Mission-Driven organizations. To summarize, Mission-driven organizations tend to emphasize accomplishment over how it is achieved, while process oriented organizations do the opposite. Mission driven organizations tend to be the most effective, but can also do great evil in being sloppy with their chosen means. Process driven organizations tend to be the most stable, but also forget their purpose and do great evil by crowding out innovation. What seems to work best is process at the tactical level, but mission at the strategic and operational/logistical level.

The in-practice organizational structure of the firm largely determines whether they embrace process or mission at scales in which this is inappropriate. Generally, strong top-down authority will result in far more mission focus, while bottom-up consensus-based authority tends to result in process focus. Modern bureaucracies and public firms tend to be the latter, while private firms and startups tend to be the former. This transition from mission to process focus at the strategic and operational level is generally a coping mechanism for scaling past dunbar's number.

In the grips of this transformation is usually when "middle management" and "human resources" personell are picked up by a firm. Authority over the worker is separated from authority over product outcomes, leading to perverse incentives and unclear loyalties. As a QA engineer, it is unclear who truly has the final say (and thus should recieve your information). Furthermore, it is not clear to the management either, and jockeying for relative authority is common.

The practical outcome of both this is that it's not clear who is the wringable neck for any given project. The personell manager will generally be unininterested in the details beyond "go or no go", as to go any further might result in them taking on responsibility which is not really theirs. Meanwhile, the project manager will not have the authority to make things happen, and so you can tell them everything they should know but it will have no practical impact. As such, the critical decisionmaking loop of which QA is a critical component is broken, and accomplishing the mission is no longer possible. The situation degenerates into mere quality control (following procedure), as that's the only thing left that can be done. For more information on this subject, consider the 1988 book "Moral Mazes: The world of corporate managers".

What then, shall we do? Ultimate Smackdown!

To actually soldier on and try to make it work simply means the QA is placing responsibility for the project upon their own head with no real authority over whether it succeeds or fails. Only a lunatic with no instinct for self-preservation would continue doing this for long (ask me how I know!), and truly pathological solutions to organizational problems result from this. It's rare to see an organization recognize this and allow QA to "be the bad guy" here as a sort of kayfabe to cope with this organizational reality. IBM was one of the first to do it, and many other organizations have done it since; this is most common amongst the security testing field. The only other (pathological) thing that works looks so much like a guerrilla insurgency for quality that it inevitably disturbs the management to the point that heads roll.

Ultimately, integrating test too tightly with development is a mistake. Rather than try to shoehorn a job which must at some level be invalidational and adversarial into a team-based process, a more arms-length relationship is warranted.

Testing is actually the easy part. Making any of it matter is the hard part.

I saw a good article come over the wire: The Perl Echo Chamber: Is perl really dying? Friends, it's worse. The perl we knew and love is already dead because the industry it grew up with is too...mature. The days of us living on the edge are over forever.

One passage in the linked article gets to half of the truth:

my conclusion is that it’s the libraries and the ecosystem that drive language use, and not the language itself.

When was the last time you thought about making an innovative new hammer or working for a roofing company? I thought not. What I am saying is that when the industry for which a toolset is primarily associated with becomes saturated, innovation will die because at some point it's good e-damn 'nough.

The web years were a hell of a rush and much like the early oil industry, the policy was drill, baby drill. Someday you run out of productive wells and new drilling tech just isn't worth developing for a long, long time. We're here. The fact that there are more web control panels, CMSes and virtualization options than you can shake a stick at is testament to this fact.

It's not all bad news though

As they say, the cure to low prices is low prices and vice versa. Given enough time, web expertise will actually be lost, much like carpentry is in the US market (because it just doesn't pay.) The need for it won't, so what we can expect the future to look like is less "bigco makes thing" than "artisan programmer cleans out rot and keeps building standing another 20 years".

Similarly, innovation doesn't totally die, it just slows down. Hell, I didn't know you could do in-place plunge cuts using an oscillating saw growing up doing lots of carpentry, but now it's commonplace. Programming Languages, Libraries, databases...they're just another tool in the bag. I'm not gonna cry over whether it's a Makita or a DeWalt.

Get over it, we're plumbers now. Who cares if your spanner doesn't change in a century. If you want to work on the bleeding edge, learn Python and Data Science or whatever they program robots with because that's what there's demand for.

A bizarre phenomenon in modern Corporations is what is generally referred to as "Playing House"; this would have been referred to in earlier times as "putting on airs". You may have noticed I've mentioned this in multiple of my earlier videos.

Generally this will mean things like Advertising how amazing your company is rather than the utility or desirability of your products. When I was young my father would point out such things to me; he generally considered it a sign of weakness in a firm, as it meant they didn't have any better ideas on what to advertise. While this is indeed true, it's not because they have no good ideas but because their idea is to sell the company.

In earlier times before Social Media, it was generally only firms which wished to be bought (or were publicly traded) which engaged in this behavior. However, now that everything is branding, practically every company plays the game unless they are largely immune to market forces.

Even then, large hegemonic institutions still do this, as it tends to be the cheapest way to purchase influence and legitimacy. See the Postscript on the Societies of Control by Deleuze for why this is. You see ridiculosity such as videos of soldiers dancing the macarena with the hapless peasants whose countries they occupy because of this.

Reinforcing that trend is that the corporate environment is almost always the same as the large hegemonic institutions, just in miniature. They tend to "ape their betters" as yet another way of demonstrating higher value.

However, "Clout Chasing" (also known as the "maximizing reach" marketing model -- see Rory Sutherland on this here) has largely reached the point of diminishing returns. This model is generally feast-or-famine; Understanding this makes you realize why the FAANG stocks are nearly a fifth of the S&P market cap. Yet many continue to willingly barrel into a game with an obvious pareto distribution without the slightest clue "what it takes" to actually enter that rarified stratosphere.

So, they make the same mistake of so many others by thinking "oh, I'll just look like the top 20% and it'll work, right?" Few understand that luxury brands are built by being different from everything else, which also means your company culture has to be different too. So, they hire an army of "Scrum Consultants", "Facilitators" and Managers to fit their dollop of the workforce into Procrustes' Bed. Millions of wasted hours in meetings and "Team Building" exercises later, the ownership starts wondering why it is their margins keep going down and that they have trouble retaining top talent.

It's the same story in the Hegemonic Institutions; Muth's Command Culture describes in great detail how the US Army (and eventually the Prussians too!) made the mistake of thinking the structure of the Prussian military was why it won, when in reality it was their highly skilled people and a lack of organizational barriers to their pursuit of success. The Map is not the territory, as they say.

All institutions are only as successful and righteous as their members can allow them to be. Most skilled people rarely consider exit until institutional barriers prove to hinder their ability to excel (which is freedom -- the ability to self-actualize). The trouble is that optimizing for Clout and Reach means that all controversial thought must be purged, as Guilt by Association is considered a lethal risk to your reach.

In reality it actually isn't -- "Love me, Hate me, but Don't Forget me" is actually the maxim which should be adopted; Oracle would have long since shuttered if having a negative reputation had anything to do with your reach. Being a source of Indignation is as effective as being a source of Comfort to build reach.

However this is not a common strategy due to the fact that most employees don't want to feel like they work for a devil. So, we instead get this elaborate maze of mission statements, team building and "CULTure" to brainwash the drones into believing whatever the company does is the "right thing" TM. Any employees who look at things objectively are demonized as being "Toxic" and "Negative" and ultimately pushed out.

The trouble with this is that the most effective people only get that way by seeing the world for what it is, and then navigating appropriately. When put into an environment where they know they cannot freely express themselves this is a high default level of friction that means they'll be ready to bolt or blow up over minor things. It takes but a straw to overburden a person walking upon eggshells.

From the perspective of the effective worker, most corporate simply looks like a crab bucket. Any person who tries to excel (make it to the top of the bucket and possibly out) is immediately grabbed by the other crabs and forced back down into their little hell. This is horrific for productivity, as it means the organization is not pulling forward, but in all directions (which means they are effectively adrift).

Which brings us back to the whole "lack of better ideas than getting sold" thing. This condition is actually tolerable when attempting to sell a firm; prospective buyers rarely care about the opinions or conditions of the line workers. But with the advent of this being 24/7 365 for nearly all firms and institutions this stultification has become inescapable save for under the ministrations of "Turnaround Capital". These firms buy cheap and hated firms, stop playing house and start making money by unleashing their people to be productive. They don't have to resort to the usual nonsense because turning a failure into a success is enough of a demonstration of higher value.

Given enough time though, all companies have their growth level off and become boring. This is when these veblenesque measures take hold, as familiarity is lethal to attraction (building that is the essence of sales). It's like secondary sex characteristics for figments of our imagination which are legally people.

It's that last bit that's where the rub lies and why it all goes so wrong. The Principal-Agent problem is fundamentally why the people running firms end up screwing up their charge worse than child beauty pageant contestants. The whole reputational protection of the employees (need to see themselves as good) referred to earlier is one such case.

Here are a few others (list is by no means complete):

Stock Buybacks:
If the argument used that "there is no better use of our money than to speculate in our own stock" (WOW what a flex) were actually true, they'd issue a dividend and tell their shareholders as much. The fact that this is not what is done tells you most of what you want to know. The reality has to do with an executive team's compensation tied to share price.

Shiny new Office:
While workers tend to expect a minimum level of comfort, the level required for high performance to take hold is far lower than believed. Repeated study has shown there to be little difference in productivity for nonwork facilities such as cafeterias, break rooms, gyms and game rooms. The actual reason is that the agents want more a social club, and to attract different types of (read: nonproductive) workers, as essentially paid friends.

Core Values, COCs, etc
It is worth noting that the pursuit of profit or regard for shareholders and customers is almost never in any of these statements. Rather than assume you are working with adults who can figure their intrapersonal problems out, let us build a procrustes' bed so that we'll never have any problems! This kind of contract to adhere to vague values (which frequently contradict religious convictions and are immaterial to the work) can never be seen as anything but an unconscionable contract of adhesion.

It is very similar to the ridiculous "Covert Contract" concept (If I do X in Y emotional relationship it will be trouble free), and nobody is shocked at it's repeated failure. Nevertheless endless amounts of time is wasted on nonsense like this which ultimately serves only as more roadblocks to productivity (and thus impetus for the productive to exit). Similarly, many lower status employees use it as a club against higher status ones; this is the essence of the crab bucket.

For example, a common theme in CoCs & "Values" statements is that colleagues must be shown "respect" of which the level is never clearly defined. It then becomes a mystery why bad ideas proliferate as "well golly gee we gotta respect everyone" regardless of whether such respect is merited or not.

This sort of application of the "reach" marketing philosophy (I have a hammer, everything is a nail) is especially ridiculous here. Let us be so open minded our brains fall right out. Let us be so approachable that we get mugged in broad daylight. Let us kowtow to our agents (especially the lawyers) such that our shareholders are ruined.

Were people rational about these things, they would simply insure employees against lawsuits resulting from interpersonal conflicts and move on. It'd be a lot cheaper than letting lawyers strangle your corporation with rules. It would also still weed out the truly troublesome via excessive premium increases. However, that acknowledges human nature and imperfection, which is not how the agents want to see themselves -- they are all angels, and like to virtue-signal. Management sees all this money they are "saving" avoiding lawsuits but forget the money left on the table by the talent which left or was forced out.

Ultimately all these statements of virtue are actually signals of luxury and lesiure (abundance). People in conditions of scarcity cannot afford to let principle get in the way of profit. Which makes many of these things emanating from firms with high Debt to Income ratios, triple digit P/Es and yield below 1% seem quite bizarre.

There are a few other dubiously useful things like offsite meetings and dinners, but that can be reasonably justified as compensation (but that avoids taxation, yay). The most complete picture of the situation was written when I was but four years old: The Suicidal Corporation. Give it a gander when you get a chance.

Knowing all this, what then shall we do? By and large, the productive have chosen exit or been forced into entrepeneurship. The whole "rise of the hustle economy" is pretty much exactly this. Instead of the corporate strategy of maximizing reach, they instead maximize engagement. Which is a hell of a lot more effective in the long run.

Which means that as a high-talent person you too have to play the "Demonstrating Higher Value" game, rather than be able to toil and build wealth in obscurity. So rather than lament the situation I have decided instead to embrace it. In retrospect, it is really the only path left for growth as I have more or less reached the highest echelons of compensation as a software developer for my market already.

When preparing any tool which you see all the pieces readily available, but that nobody has executed upon, you begin to ask yourself why that is. This is essentially what I've been going through building the pairwise tool.

Every time  I look around and don't see a solution for an old problem on CPAN, my spider-senses start to fire.  I saw no N-dimensional combination methods (only n Choose k) or bin covering algorithms, and when you see a lack of N-dimensional solutions that usually means there is a lack of closed form general solutions to that problem.  While this is not true for my problem space, it rubs right up against the edge of NP hard problems.  So it's not exactly shocking I didn't see anything fit to purpose.

The idea behind pairwise test execution is actually quite simple, but the constraints of the software systems surrounding it risk making it more complex than is manageable. This is because unless we confine ourselves to a very specific set of constraints, we run into not one, but two NP hard problems. We could then be forced into the unfortunate situation where we have to use Polynomial time approximations.

I've run into this a few times in my career. Each time the team grows disheartened as what the customer wants seems on the surface to be impossible. I always remember that there is always a way to win by cheating (more tight constraints). Even the tyranny of the rocket equation was overcome through these means (let's put a little rocket on a big one!)

Breaking it down

The first problem is that N-Wise test choosing is simply a combination.
This results in far, far more platforms to test than is practical once you get beyond 3 independent variables relevant to your system under test. For example:

A combination with 3 sets containing 3, 5 and 8 will result in 3 * 5 * 8 = 120 systems under test! Adding in a fourth or fifth will quickly bring you into the territory of thousands of systems to test.  While this is straightforward to accomplish these days, it is quite expensive.

What we actually want is an expression of the pigeonhole principle.  We wish to build sets where every element of each component set is seen at least once, as this will cover everything with the minimum number of needed systems under test.  This preserves the practical purpose of pairwise testing quite nicely.

In summary, we have a clique problem and a bin covering problem. This means that we have to build a number of bins from X number of sets each containing some amount of members. We then have to fill said bins with a bunch of tests in a way which will result in them being executed as fast as is possible.

Each bin we build will represent some system under test, and each set from which we build these bins a particular important attribute. For example, consider these sets:

• Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, OSX
• Processor Architecture: 32-bit, 64-bit
• Browser: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Brave, Opera, SeaMonkey

A random selection will result in an optimal multi-dimensional "pairwise" set of systems under test:

1. Firefox - Windows - 64 Bit
2. Chrome - Linux - 32 Bit
3. Safari - Windows - 32 Bit
4. Brave - OSX - 32 Bit
5. Opera - OSX - 64 Bit
6. SeaMonkey - Linux - 64-Bit
   

The idea is to pick one of each of the set with the most members and then pick from the remaining ones at the index of the current pick from the big set modulo the smaller set's size. This is the "weak" form of the Pigeonhole Principle in action, which is why it is solved easily with the Chinese remainder theorem.

Sometimes you can oversimplify

You may have noticed that perhaps we are going too far with our constraints here. This brings in danger, as the "strong" general form of the pigeonhole principle means we are treading into the waters of Ramsey's (clique) problem. For example, if we drop either of these two assumptions we can derive from our sets:

1. No element of any given set is repeated
2. No element of any given set is shared with another

We immediately descend into the realm of the NP hard problem. This is because we are no longer a principal ideal domain and can no longer cheat using the Chinese remainder theorem. In this reality, we are solving the Anti-Clique problem specifically, which is particularly nasty. Thankfully, we can consider those two constraints to be quite realistic.

We will have to account for the fact that the variables are actually not independent. You may have noticed that some of these "optimal" configurations are not actually realistic. Many Operating systems do not support various processor architectures and software packages. Three of the configurations above are currently invalid for at least one reason.  Consider a configuration object like so:

Can we throw away these configurations without simply "re-rolling" the dice?  Unfortunately, no.  Not without using the god algorithm of computing every possible combination ahead of time, and therefore already knowing the answer.  As such our final implementation looks like so:

This brings us to another unmentioned constraint: what happens if a member of a set is incompatible with all members of another set?  It turns out accepting this is actually a significant optimization, as we will end up never having to re-roll an entire sequence.  See the while loop above.

Another complication is the fact that we will have to randomize the set order to achieve the goal of eventual coverage of every possible combination. Given the intention of the tool is to run decentralized and without a central oracle other than git, we'll have to also have use a seed based upon it's current state.  The algorithm above does not implement this, but it should be straightforward to add.

Filling the bins

We at least have a solution to the problem of building the bins. So, we can move on to filling them. Here we will encounter trade-offs which are quite severe. If we wish to accurately reflect reality with our assumptions, we immediately stray into "no closed form solution" territory. This is the Fair Item Allocation problem, but with a significant twist.  To take advantage of our available resources better, we should always execute at least one test. This will result in fewer iterations to run through every possible combination of systems to test, but also means we've cheated by adding a "double spend" on the low-end.  Hooray cheating!

The fastest approximation is essentially to dole out a number of tests equal to the floor of dividing the tests equally among the bins plus floor(  (tests % bins)  / tests ) in the case you have less tests than bins. This has an error which is not significant until you reach millions of tests. We then get eaten alive by rounding error due to flooring.

It is worth noting there is yet another minor optimization in our production process here at the end, namely that if we have more systems available for tests than tests to execute, we can achieve total coverage in less iterations by repeating tests from earlier groups.

Trade-offs in my trade-offs

1. Each item we are packing into a bin is of equal size. This means every test is assumed to run in the same amount of time on the same computer.
2. Each item is indivisible
3. Each bin values each item equally (in our context this means "every computer executes it in the same amount of time")
4. Each test will never change in how long it takes to execute when it changes, or the system under test does.
5. Each bin represents one computer only.

Obviously the only realistic assumption here is #2. If tests can be executed faster by breaking them into smaller tests, the test authors should do so, not an argument builder.

Assumptions #1 and #3, if we take them seriously would not only doom us to solving an NP hard problem, but have a host of other practical issues. Knowing how long each test takes on each computer is quite a large sampling problem, though solvable eventually even using only git tags to store this data. Even then, #4 makes this an exercise in futility. We really have no choice but to accept this source of inefficiency in our production process.

Invalidating #5 does not bring us too much trouble. Since we expect to have a number of test hosts which will satisfy any given configuration from the optimal group and will know how many there are ahead of time, we can simply split the bin over the available hosts and re-run our bin packer over those hosts.

This will inevitably result in a situation where you have an overabundance of available systems under test for some configurations and a shortage of others. Given enough tests, this can result in workflow disruptions. This is a hard problem to solve without "throwing money at the problem", or being more judicious with what configurations you support in the first place. That is the sort of problem an organization wants to have though. It is preferable to the problem of wasting money testing everything on every configuration.

Whither N-wise

Since the name of the tool is pairwise, I may as well also implement and discuss multi-set combinations.  Building these bins is actually quite straightforward, which is somewhat shocking given every algorithm featured for doing pairwise testing at pairwise.org was not in fact the optimal one from my 30 year old combinatorics textbook.  Pretty much all of them used tail-call recursion in languages which do not optimize this, or they took (good) shortcuts which prevented them from functioning in N dimensions.

Essentially you build an iterator which, starting with the first set, pushes a partial combination with every element of its set matched with one of the second onto your stack.
You then repeat the process, considering the first set to be the partial, and crank right through all the remaining sets.

Dealing with incompatibilities is essentially the same procedure as above.  The completed algorithm looks like so:

Uniting all under Heaven

You may have noticed this is a greedy algorithm.  If we decided to use this as a way to generate a cache for a "god algorithm" version of the anti-clique generator above, we could very easily run into memory exhaustion with large enough configuration sets, defeating the purpose. You could flush the partials that are actually complete, but even then you'd only be down to 1/n theoretical memory usage where n is the size of your 2nd largest configuration set (supposing you sort such that it's encountered last).  This may prove "good enough" in practice, especially since users tend to tolerate delays in the "node added to network" phase better than the "trying to run tests" phase.  It would also speed up the matching of available systems under test to the desired configuration supersets, as we could also "already know the answer".

Profiling this showed that I either had to fix my algorithm or resort to this.  My "worst case" example of 100 million tests using the cliques() method took 3s, while generating everything took 4.  Profiling shows the inefficient parts are almost 100% my bin-covering.

Almost all of this time is spent splice()ing huge arrays of tests.  In fact, the vast majority of the time in my test (20s total!) is simply building the sequence (1..100_000_000), which we are using as a substitute for a similar length argument array of tests.

We are in luck, as once again we have an optimization suggested by the constraints of our execution environment.  Given any host only needs to know what it needs to execute we can save only the relevant indices, and do lazy evaluation.  This means our sequence expansion (which takes the most time) has an upper bound of how long it takes to generate up to our offset.  The change is straightforward:

The question is, can we cheat even more by starting at our offset too?  Given we are expecting a glob or regex describing a number of files which we don't know ahead of time what will be produced, this seems unlikely.  We could probably speed it up globbing with GLOB_NOSORT. Practically every other sieve trick we can try (see DeMorgan's Laws) is already part of the C library implementing glob itself.  I suspect that we will have to understand the parity problem a great deal better for optimal seeking via search criteria.

Nevertheless, this gets our execution time for the cliques() algorithm down to 10ms, and 3s as the upper bound to generate our sequence isn't bad compared to how long it will take to execute our subset of 100 million tests.  We'd probably slow the program down using a cached solution at this point, not to mention having to deal with the problems inherent with such.  Generating all combinations as we'd have to do to build the cache itself takes another 3s, and there's no reason to punish most users just to handle truly extreme data sets.

It is possible we could optimize our check that a combination is valid, and get a more reasonable execution time for combine() as well.  Here's our routine as a refresher:

Making the inner grep a List::Util::first instead seems obvious, but the added overhead made it not worth it for the small data set. Removing our guard on the other hand halved execution time, so I have removed it in production.  Who knew ref( ) was so slow?  Next, I "disengaged safety protocols" by turning off warnings and killing the defined check.  This made no appreciable difference, so I still haven't yet run into a situation where I've needed to turn off warnings in a tight loop.  Removing the unnecessary allocation of @compat and returning directly shaved another 200ms.  All told, I got down to 800ms, which is in "detectable but barely" delay territory, which is good enough in my book.

Conclusion

The thing I take away from all this is that the most useful thing a mathematics education teaches is the ability to identify specific problems as instances of generalized problems (to which a great deal of thinking has already been devoted).  While this is not a new lesson, I continuously astonish myself how unreasonably effective it is.  That, and exposure to the wide variety of pursuits in mathematics gives a leg up as to where to start looking.

I also think the model I took developing this has real strength.  Developing a program while simultaneously doing what amounts to a term paper on how it's to operate very clearly draws out the constraints and acceptance criteria from a program in an apriori way.  It also makes documentation a fait accompli.  Making sure to test and profile while doing this as well completed the (as best as is possible without users) methodologically dual design, giving me the utmost confidence that this program will be fit for purpose.  Given most "technical debt" is caused by not fully understanding the problem when going into writing your program (which is so common it might shock the uninitiated) and making sub-optimal trade-offs when designing it, I think this approach mitigates most risks in that regard.

That said, it's a lot harder to think things through and then test your hypotheses than just charging in like a bull in a china shop or groping in the dark.  This is the most common pattern I see in practice doing software development professionally.  To be fair, it's not like people are actually willing to pay for what it takes to achieve real quality, and "good enough" often is.  Bounded rationality is the rule of the day, and our lot in life is mostly that of a satisficer.  Optimal can be the enemy of good, and the tradeoffs we've made here certainly prove this out.

When I was doing QA for a living people are surprised when I tell them the most important book for testers to read is Administrative Behavior. This is because you have to understand the constraints of your environment do do your job well, which is to provide actionable information to decision-makers.  I'm beginning to realize this actually suffuses the entire development process from top to bottom.

Basically nothing about the response on social media to my prior post has shocked me.

The very first response was "this is a strawman". Duh. It should go without saying that everyone's perception of others can't be 100% accurate. I definitely get why some people put "Don't eat paint" warnings on their content, because apparently that's the default level of discourse online.

Much of the rest of the criticism is to confuse "don't be so nice" with "be a jerk". There are plenty of ways to politely insist on getting your needs met in life. Much of the frustrations Sawyer is experiencing with his interactions are to some degree self-inflicted. This is because he responds to far too much, unwittingly training irritating people to irritate him more.

This is the most common failure mode of "look how hard I tried". The harder you "try" to respond to everything, the worse it gets. Trust me, I learned this the hard way. If you instead ignore the irritating, they eventually "get the message" and slink off. It's a simple question: Would you rather be happy, or right? I need to be happy. I don't need other people to know I'm right.

I'm also not shocked that wading into drama / "red-meat" territory got me more engagement on a post than anything else I've got up here to date. This is just how things work online -- controversy of some kind is necessary. Yet another reason to stop being nice; goring someone's ox is just the kind of sacrifice needed to satiate the search engine gods, apparently.

This is not to say I don't find it distasteful, indeed there is a reason I do not just chase this stuff with reckless abandon. What I want is to have a positive impact on the community at large, and I think I may just have done it (see the image with this post).

Even though I gored a few oxen-feels posting this, it's clearly made a positive impact on at least one person's life. That alone makes it worth it. I still take the scout's vow to do a good turn daily seriously. Keep stacking those bricks, friends.

SawyerX has resigned from the Perl 5 steering council. This is unfortunate for a variety of reasons, the worst of which is that it is essentially an unnecessary self-sabotage which won't achieve Sawyer anything productive.

I met Sawyer in a cafe in Riga during the last in-person EU Perl 5/6 con. Thankfully much of the discussion was of a technical nature, but of course the drama of the moment was brought up. Andrew Shitov, a Russian was culturally insensitive to westerners, go figure. He apologized and it blew over, but some people insisted on grinding an axe because they valued being outraged more than getting on with business.

It was pretty clear that Sawyer was siding with the outraged, but still wanted the show to go on. I had a feeling this (perceived) fence-sitting would win him no points, and observed this play out.

This discussion naturally segued into his experience with P5P, where much the same complaints as lead to his resignation were aired. At the time he was a pumpking, and I stated my opinion that he should just lead unrepentantly. I recall saying something to the effect of "What are you afraid of? That people would stop using perl? This is already happening." At the time it appears he was just frustrated enough to actually lead.

This lead to some of the most forward progress perl5 has had in a long time. For better or worse, the proto-PSC decided to move forward. At the time I felt cautiously optimistic because while his frustration was a powerful motivator, I felt that the underlying mental model causing his frustration would eventually torpedo his effort.

This has come to pass. The game he's playing out here unconsciously is called "look how hard I'm trying". It's part of the Nice Guy social toolkit. Essentially the worldview is a colossal covert contract: "If I try hard and don't offend anyone, everyone will love me!"

It's unsurprising that he's like this, as I've seen this almost everywhere in the software industry. I was like this once myself. Corporate is practically packed from bottom to top with "nice guys". This comes into conflict with the big wide world of perl, as many of the skilled perlers interested in the core language are entrepreneurs.

In our world, being nice gets you nowhere. It doesn't help you in corporate either, but corporate goes to great effort to forestall the cognitive dissonance which breaks people out of this mental model. The reason for this is straightforward. Studies have repeatedly shown those with agreeable personalities are paid less.

Anyways, this exposes "nice" people to rationally disagreeable and self-interested people. Fireworks ensue when their covert contract is not only broken, but laughed at. Which brings us to today, where Sawyer's frustration has pushed him into making a big mistake which he thinks (at some level, or he would not have done it) will get him what he wants.

It won't. Nobody cares how hard you worked to make it right. Those around you will "just say things" forever, and play what have you done for me lately on repeat until the end of time. Such is our lot as humans, and the first step in healing is to accept it.

Future people considering hiring Sawyer will not have a positive view of these actions. Rather than seeing the upright and sincere person exhausted by shenanigans that Sawyer sees in himself, they will see a person who cracked under pressure and that therefore can't be trusted for the big jobs.

I hate seeing fellow developers make some of the same mistakes I did earlier in life. Especially if the reason he cracked now has to do with other things going on in his personal life which none of us are or should be privy to. Many men come to the point where it's "Kill the nice guy, before he kills you". Let us hope the situation is not developing into anything that severe, so that he can right his ship and return to doing good work.

I'm borrowing the title of a famous post by patio11, because I clearly hate having google juice because it's good and touches on similar points to my former colleague Mark Gardner recently made. (See what I did there, cross site linking! Maybe I don't hate having google juice after all...)

Anyways, he mentioned that despite having a sprint fail, he still learned a lot of good stuff. This happens a lot as a software developer and you need to be aware of this to ensure you maximize your opportunities to take something positive away from everything you work on.

On that note, I had a similar thing happen to me this week with playwright-perl. It turns out I didn't have to write a custom server with express to expose the Playwright API to Perl. The Playwright team have a command line program which talks on stdin/stdout to do these RPC calls for their python and go clients.

The reason I didn't know about it was that it is not documented! The only reason I found out was due to hopping into the Playwright slack and getting some good feedback from one of the Playwright devs.

This might seem like I did a bunch of work for no reason, and now have to do expensive re-tooling. I actually don't have to do anything if I don't want to. My approach seems to work quite well as-is. That said, even when I do replace it (as this will be good from a maintenance POV), the existing code can be re-used to make one of the things I really want. Namely, a selenium server built with playwright.

This would give me all the powerful new features, reliability and simpler setup that traditional Selenium servers don't have. Furthermore, (if it catches on) it means the browser vendors can stop worrying about releasing buggy selenium driver binaries and focus on making sure their devToolsProtocols are top-shelf. (Spoiler alert: This is one of the secret reasons I wrote Selenium::Client.)

This also shouldn't be too much of a hurdle, given I have machine-readable specs for both APIs, which means it's just a matter of building the needed surjections. Famous last words eh? Should make for an interesting Q3 project in any case.

1. Release PageNSA page activity watcher.
2. Build a new tool "pairwise". I'll do a video on this soon.
3. Release a few of my "test obscure scenario" scripts.
4. Configure automatic docker image creation and Github actions for tCMS
5. Finishing the transition of tCMS to "everything is a series" data model (see Issue 130)
6. Porting Overload::FileCheck to windows - This still has a couple of failing tests (I’ve screwed up something porting over the XS): teodesian/Overload-FileCheck at win32 (github.com)
7. Adding JSONWire support (and then WinAppDriver support) to Selenium::Client
8. Re-factor Selenium::Remote::Driver to use Selenium::Client as backend rather than Selenium::Remote::RemoteConnection, CanStartBinary, etc
9. Writing unit tests for Selenium::Client