Quality Is Systemic

jacobian.org

37 points·asplake··4 comments

I feel like I haven't been on a "good" dev team in many, many years.

Everyone seems to only be interested in the shortest path from A->B and not really developing any love of the craft and investing in processes that create virtuous cycles and repay on their investment.

"DevOps" ends up just being people cutting corners in deployment and software operations on top of cutting corners in the product code.

I take a lot of pride in my work and I want to work on a team that takes pride in their work and doing things the Right Way.

Same here. Haven’t found such a place. They might say they care about quality but in practice they care about the deadline and/or feature count above all else.

Maybe this era of cheap money coming to an end will change that, since it won’t be as easy to throw good money after bad to duct tape workarounds. Instead, management layers will be forced to do it right. But I’m not holding my breath.

This is correct. I think all programmers have to go through writing lots of tests and feel the burn. On the other side, you may reach a place where you know where you make mistakes and are extra careful to do things right in the first place.

But it is a spectrum. It is the big teams with a lot of code churn working in a less descriptive language that absolutely need tests.

Personally, I have written very few tests after I moved to clojure and small standalone teams. I hardly had to fix any bugs after.

For me focusing on BDD over TDD - or just ensuring I am testing behavior over small component functionality - gives me a lot of lift.

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