A intellectually curious software engineer's blog.
Historically, the standard strategy for testing software was the test pyramid. More recently, developers challenged this strategy, but it’s unclear whether their objections are substantive or semantic.
This is my hot take on building an effective test suite.
In broad terms, a recommender system:
But this process is not exclusive to recommenders. Humans make decisions in a similar way.
In a letter to Amazon’s shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote:
Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.
This put two questions on my mind: