The absolute don'ts of software engineering

imaginarycloud.com

8 pointssandrobfc4 comments

This should be titled "the absolute don'ts of software engineering when you have large projects, large teams, and lots of money."

Most of the projects I work on are small, the teams are often a team of 1 (me), and the money barely covers my living expenses. So a lot of this gets chucked out of the window. Sometimes folks, it's OK to SSH into a VM and type git pull ; touch tmp/restart.txt. :)

Allow me to disagree. :)

I've worked on low budget one man shows. Nevertheless I did TDD all the way and, I still wrote my cap scripts to deploy and asked the client to validate the implementation was right.

You might not tick all the boxes on the list for one man projects, but you can definitely do them with a team of two.

These are guidelines, not absolutes. When your back is against the wall, it's perfectly reasonable to completely ignore these, at least in the short term.

To me, the ultimate "absolute don't" of engineering is "don't make decisions without considering the tradeoffs". When to follow and when to ignore these guidelines follows from that.

That's exactly the opposite of what I say in the post :)

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