Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/One-line fix

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. SarekOfVulcan (talk) 16:37, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

One-line fix

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A non-notable term. Apparently the creators of the Jargon File (the initial source for this article) consider "one-line fix" to be a sarcastic joke. In real life, however, many bug fixes are just one line - just like some are two lines, etc. I don't see any evidence, other than the Jargon File itself, that this term ever took on a life of its own, beyond its literal meaning. Yaron K. (talk) 12:53, 31 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. —Tom Morris (talk) 20:49, 31 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Wikipedia is not a dictionary WP:NOT#DICTIONARY. Completely implausible that sources could be found to establish notability as required by WP:GNG. Msnicki (talk) 20:57, 31 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I couldn't find a reliable source that established notability. Axl ¤ [Talk] 08:38, 1 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep This is a sarcastic term with huge currency across the industry. The point is that "one-line fixes", like "five minute job" and "one pipe problem" are rarely anything of the sort. It belongs with "silver bullet" and (more particularly) "no silver bullet". For some reason, human ability to estimate the complexity of a solution remains relentlessly over-optimistic, even when this effect is already known. The current article is true enough, a simple WP:DICDEF, but there's scope here for something quite interesting, if anyone with an interest in writing was to expand it. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:56, 1 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Has not been expanded in seven years, so probably a WP:Permastub. Articles are supposed to be "topics" not glossary entries. This clearly is just one possible term for what would be a "bug fix" which I see redirects to patch (computing) so if anything, merge there. W Nowicki (talk) 19:27, 1 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Patch has little to do with it and would be an inappropriate redirect. "One-line fix"'s notability is about the misplaced optimism that an anticipated fix will be simple to develop. "Patches" are about the deployment mechanism of completed fixes. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:04, 1 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I just looked around on Wikipedia, and it looks like there are at least two articles that already cover that phenomenon of misplaced optimism that you're talking about - planning fallacy and optimism bias. I guess one could make that case that "one-line fix" should redirect to one of those - but as I said before, I haven't seen any evidence that "one-line fix" has a widespread meaning as a quasi-synonym for those terms. Yaron K. (talk) 21:22, 1 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

They would be better targets that "patch", if we did make this a redirect. Planning fallacy is probably the best. There should be a para or section added noting the relevance for software development. Mind you, planning over-optimism in software is a big enough topic to support several books, all on its own. I've just checked an 8k page software dev wiki I have here and 73 pages (counted quickly by cats) could be classed as being about "planning optimism in software development". Andy Dingley (talk) 23:04, 1 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep The topic is notable. For example, in Testing IT, "As testers, we have to create the understanding among the authorities that there never has been and probably never will be such a thing as a “quick one line fix” and that with every fix there is a high risk of collateral damage..." Or Software maintenance, "In contrast, during maintenance, a given problem may be very difficult to debug, but once the fix is identified, it could be just a one- line fix. Thus, there is no direct correlation between size and effort estimates in general". And, of course, when searching for sources, one must consider alternate phrasing such as "one-line change" which takes us to the excellent source Toward Understanding the Rhetoric of Small Source Code Changes. Warden (talk) 22:40, 1 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't dispute that the phrase "one-line fix" gets used - I've used it from time to time too, as a programmer. What I dispute is whether it has any notability beyond its literal meaning of "a software fix that involves one line of code". Interestingly, of the (let's say) three examples you found, two of them use the phrase straightforwardly - which would seem to cast doubt on Andy Dingley's assertion above that the phrase has "huge currency" as a sarcastic term. Yaron K. (talk) 00:05, 2 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I completely agree with Yaron K. I think the phrase gets used literally (along with the variants, "2-line fix", "3-line fix", "4-line fix", etc.) a lot more often than it gets used as a sarcastic phrase. There's no way it has any special notability, which is exactly why there are no sources. Msnicki (talk) 01:32, 2 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The nay-sayers seem to be offering personal opinions from their own experience, contrary to WP:OR. The claim that there are no sources is not exact; it is false. The source Toward Understanding the Rhetoric of Small Source Code Changes seems reliable and addresses the topic in detail. For example, the abstract tells us that "1) there is less than 4 percent probability that a one-line change will introduce a fault in the code, 2) nearly 10 percent of all changes made during the maintenance of the software under consideration were one-line changes ..." Warden (talk) 10:13, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A "one-line fix" doesn't mean a "one-line change". The problem is that assumed one-line fixes normally turn out to be more complex than that (false optimism when estimating before investigating). The resultant "multi-line change" is then deployed within the limited test budget allocated to this anticipated simple "one-line change". The 4% probability you cite is no longer relevant (the actual change was multi-line, not one-line), but the test effort allocation is probably inadequate to detect this. False optimism for one-line fixes is thus very dangerous for product quality - it encourages a simplistic and inadequate effort for quality maintenance on such fixes, whilst the fixes turn out to be excessively complex to allow that assumption to stand safely. Thus "one-line fixes" gain their existing poor reputation as a source of problems out of all proportion to their original impact. The fix is a robust system of continuous testing in place before working on such fixes. As the incremental effort of testing under such a regime is zero (it's subsumed under a fixed overhead, whether changes are made or not, and whatever the size of change) the ratio between re-test effort applied / anticipated change size is decoupled from this flakey optimism and we no longer find ourselves hazardously under-testing when we still need to, because "it was only going to be a one-line fix". Andy Dingley (talk) 11:06, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Again you seem to be giving us your opinion, rather than examining the sources. Here's another source — Towards Understanding Software Evolution: One-Line Changes — which examines the thesis of a software guru that "a one-line change has a 50% chance of being wrong". Such sources indicate that we have a notable topic here. Exactly what we say about the topic is a matter of examining such sources and using ordinary editing. Deletion would not be helpful in this and this is the point of our discussion. Warden (talk) 12:57, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

delete as a dictionary definition/neologism. I too have used it and seen it used but quite literally and trivially: a one line fix is a fix that involves changing a single line. It is very common, not 'notorious' or often used 'sarcastically' as the article describes.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 02:16, 4 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Clearly there are adequate sources, this is a notable phrase, and it's not merely a dictionary definition. There is more complex explanation about the various uses and meanings of the phrase to be added, per the discussion even here about sarcasm versus literally referring to which line needs fixing. If this were the kind of thing a mere dicdef could describe reliably, then it would have a Wiktionary entry (which it does not, because it's an encyclopedic topic). If consensus ends up being not to keep, I'd prefer to see this merged and redirected to bug fix. Steven Walling • talk 04:37, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What are the "various uses and meanings of the phrase" here? As far as I can tell, there only two - literal and sarcastic - with maybe a halfway point for skeptical in the middle. If you did a Google search on, say, "great Steven Seagal movie", you would find the same "complex" range of meanings, from sincere to sarcastic. If one could find enough instances of the phrase "great Steven Seagal movie" in published books and articles, would it merit its own Wikipedia article? No - the issue is that there are no references specifically about the phrase. Similarly, here there still seems to be only one source that discusses the concept in any detail: the Jargon File. Other sources either just include the phrase, or devote one or two sentences to it, like the book Testing IT. Yaron K. (talk) 15:26, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Building a straw man argument about some hypothetical phrase doesn't negate the fact, stated above by others and myself, that there are plenty of sources which verify that this phrase is notable. Whether you think there's enough material for an encyclopedia article is more debatable I guess, but please don't insult my intelligence by trying to compare some random phrase you thought up to a real term that is in common use. Steven Walling • talk 15:34, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Steven, he's not offering a strawman and he's not insulting anyone. He's explaining the problem in your argument, that the occurrence of the phrase is not by itself sufficient to establish notability or even that all these various occurrences are even talking about the same thing as the subject of this article. He's explaining why the article is little more than a WP:MADEUP dictionary entry. Twice now, you've argued WP:LOTSOFSOURCES, but where are they? This is what matters in an AfD discussion. Taking the question personally isn't very helpful. Msnicki (talk) 15:53, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Multiple sources have been cited above including Toward Understanding the Rhetoric of Small Source Code Changes and Towards Understanding Software Evolution: One-Line Changes. Q.E.D. Warden (talk) 17:17, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Great source. Did you read it? "[T]here is less than 4 percent probability that a one-line change introduces a fault in the code." That doesn't sound like the thesis of this article, that it has some notable sarcastic meaning. I think they were using the term literally, looking to see if they could find a relationship between the size of a change and the expected defect rate. (IEEE journals just aren't a place where you see a lot of sarcasm anyway.) Msnicki (talk) 17:27, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.