How to not die by a thousand cuts or how to think about software quality (2023)

This article is very rambling and somehow manages to miss the most important driver of reduced software quality: shifting requirements.

You can have the most beautiful perfect design that leverages the greatest abstractions in the world, and then have it all entirely destroyed by a single requirement shift that totally kills your abstractions.

Gene Kim wrote the DevOps Handbook and I think was at least involved in the related DORA and Phoenix Project and Unicorn Project office narrative books. Between those and the Google SRE book, I feel very well placed to have continuing value in the SDLC pipeline for wrangling the oncoming armies of Jr Developers-as-AI-agents-and-sometimes-humans into alignment. I also recommend System Design Interview 1 and 2 books by Xu for logical system design refurbishment, Designing Data Intensive Applications for most company programs, and Hexagonal Architecture Explained by Cockburn for finally getting something as small as a class or module to something as large as an entire Information System to have clear modular boundaries, without needing to do fuzzy pattern matching around half-remembered SOLID principles and GoF design patterns or trying to blindly apply 12 factor app design principles.

Quality used to take a back seat because there was so much legwork to do. AI has reduced the cost to be excellent, so let's be as excellent as our environments let us.

If there is a place that is hiring and cares about Software Quality, I'll take a 70% paycut to work there.

Maybe we could take a page from the SWEBOK here, which contains a lot of previous thinking on this topic.

That’s great, but how do I fix my motorcycle?

(2022)

Hey Siri, is my app doing what I wanted it to do?