Thursday
Nov112010
by Bishop Hill
CRUTEM code still not fixed
Nov 11, 2010 Bureaucrats Climate: Surface
Readers may remember that back at the start of the year, John Graham-Cumming found some errors in the CRUTEM code. He very helpfully notified the Met Office, who subsequently confirmed JG-C's findings.
The odd thing is that, according to JG-C's latest posting, the Met Office haven't actually managed to get round to fixing their live version of the code yet.
Reader Comments (15)
Arrogance or stupidity , take your pick.
KnR,
Maybe neither one. Maybe they don't care.
Because previous errors (when corrected) had no effect on the desired outcome, it would hardly seem worth the while to follow up on any new ones.
Humpy would be proud of their studious inactivity.
They should load the code and the data on to sourceforge, go home, collect their pensions, and watch the quality of 'their' work improve on a daily basis.
Maybe they just do not know how to fix the error.
The most likely explanation is that in prioritizing work done at the Hadley Centre the folks there feel this is low on the list. They indicated in their mail to me that the error was small and so I suspect they feel they've got other, more important issues to work on.
Still a pity it hasn't been corrected.
Maybe they will get the forecast for next week correct. That would be nice. But even that is unlikely.
A question to John G-C, how long would it take you to fix and test this error? Are we talking weeks, days or hours? I'm guessing hours considering you understood it back in Feb and have test programs at the ready.
Source: http://www.quotegarden.com/procrastination.html
Procrastination is like masturbation. At first it feels good, but in the end you're only screwing yourself. ~Author unknown, possibly from Monty Python?
Dilbert on bad data: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-11-07/
If it is a medium to low priority error and they employ a "major" release strategy then this is not so unusual. It could be stacked up somewhere.
I would be surprised for this sort of error fix to be pushed through to the production release as an individual item, that would only normally happen with critical error fixes.
I'd be interested to know what are their source management procedures... anyone know how they work?
However I learnt that if there are more visible errors to the world, a comma missing on a piece of text, you get more kudos for fixing that quickly than perhaps more critical errors.
If I was the Met office I would have fixed it, but I can understand the reasons for its current state.
@rc I would imagine (not having seen the code, or other systems that might depend on it) that it would be a matter of an hour to write some test cases and then fix the code.
@Jiminy Agreed. I suspect this is just too low priority for the Met Office folks to push out a fix quickly. Pity. In terms of understanding the Met Office's software development practices I'd recommend: "Engineering the Software for Understanding Climate Change", Easterbrook, Johns.
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/papers/2008/Easterbrook-Johns-2008.pdf
Harried Harry is heard in the background: "COMMENTS, you dumb *$&%^#s! Give me some &#&$^%# COMMENTS!..."
Isn't this an issue for Quality Assurance or something, knowingly allowing mistakes to remain?
@John Graham-Cumming
Thanks for that PDF link and VERY illuminating document. I have only had time for a once read through but...
Throughout the document the word "simulation" is used... and that I am sure is the word the use to outside world and to the people who pay the bills. But what that document describes is NOT simulation. Not even close.
I better word would be "projection". Their work is just projection.
Ignoring the need for paper's like this to tart up their findings with pseudo-scientific jargon, what the Hadley Centre does is not rocket science or even close it.
There are a million lines of code "organically" grown over 20 years, and it has become its own reality.
It is like building the world's biggest skyscraper (one million lines high) in a bog without good foundations.
I am not sure non-IT Engineers would fully understand that document, but I would recommend some of our IT contributors to read it.
Projection has become simulation has become reality... bloody amazing