Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Why quality first is the only effective approach to delivering software?

To answer this question we must ask first a related question: Why any new functionality should affect any previous functionality with which apparently there is no relationship? Because software is a whole instead of just individual parts. The simil here is the human body.

When you change something that you might think is not related to something else and suddenly you realize that something else failed, it requires an Engineer if we are talking about software or a Doctor if we are talking about health to actually give you response.

Yes, software must be seen as a whole and this is the reason why we have automated tests that look for regressions in the software world, the same way ideally a Doctor will follow up with tests across your body looking for signs of problems after prescribing a solution for any other problem.

Lean software teams should recognize that anything we do anywhere can have an effect somewhere else. Whether that is incomprehensible for some or not is irrelevant because it is simply a fact of life.

And this is why quality-first is the only effective approach to delivering software. Without it you are probably facing a 45% to 65% defect ratio which is holding your team from delivering more features as you keep fixing the problems you keep introducing as you go. I have found that e2e test driven development is an effective way to deliver quality-first software products.

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