Reddit mentions of Quality Is Free: The Art of Making Quality Certain

This is a major part of why I'm currently unemployed. It turns out my standards are higher than that of most employers. Which sounds arrogant as hell, but when they have no standards... ;-(

I still believe that Quality is Free, and more than that, highly profitable. But there's so much disgusting shit that goes out. I would specifically mention a few examples but I don't really feel like having a comment which could be accused of being libelous. So...I'll just say that critical infrastructure from health care to defense is being neglected because of this asshattery and I wish I could believe that it would change anytime soon. Or ever.

There does seem to be a pervasive mindset that (a) taking time to plan is useless (at least anything beyond a vague 'yeah, we know what this means; good enough' ; rarely an attempt to really get rigorous specifications), (b) documenting a system is useless (like there will never be new people to the system, or they should just know by the magic of their rockstar power how everything is intended to work), (c) QA is useless (developers should test their own code, so why do we need QA?)

It seems to come from having seen all of these things done badly and so going to the conclusion that therefore they shouldn't be done.

Like, I get that six months of detailed planning before ever trying to build anything is probably not helpful. But I also think it's useful to take time to slowly walk through various edge cases and really try to hammer out the details and then make something concrete to represent the understanding of what should be done before trying to implement.

And documentation can get stale, or can be pointless. So all the more important to make it a continuous priority to keep fresh and review (like, for instance, developers shouldn't need to be locked into a specific area; have them go take a break and review documentation and code in another section; cross-training is great as well as additional eyes!).

QA, to me, is the most important aspect of software. And yet it's treated like the most unimportant and unnecessary.

To some extent, these things are semantic points and just different perspectives on the same things: in a discussion with my second-line supervisor, we agreed on many things but he simply didn't like the terminology of QA nor the idea of an external group dedicated to testing (!).

To me, quality goes beyond any business logic to a fundamental aesthetic preference beyond even engineering and maintenance practicality. But for any business that intends to still be operating two years down the line, the overall SV attitude that "we're changing so fast we won't need to ever maintain any of this code! test your own code; we don't need QA!" is just so immature.

Which is an ironic critique since I'm the prodigal son who wandered away from the industry with little experience and was barely able to get back in, while I'm arguing against people in senior roles in some cases (one that comes to mind is a CTO of one of the many well-known SV start-ups I was interviewing with was totally gung-ho about self-documenting code and utterly dismissive of the need for any documentation; they were clearly as unimpressed by me as I was by them given the lack of offer).

But I really feel like it would be far more enjoyable (at least to my taste) as well as far more effective to have a strong culture and priority around quality rather than this minimum viable product and ignore the bugs mentality.

I know my critique is somewhat exaggerated and there's a lot of nuance to these things, but this type of thing is exactly why I put so little faith into things like full self-driving being achieved in the near-term. It frankly amazes me that any software works given how it gets built.

There's some garbled saying that comes to mind about if we built bridges the way we build software there'd be a lot more collapses....

Anyhow, I like thinking and talking about this stuff, but I don't expect to ever have the chance to put it into practice. I enjoy my leisure too much to devote decades of my life to someday having the opportunity to prove that "Quality is Free" in software too (that management book from 1980 by a guy working on quality in manufacturing is the most important single thing I would recommend anyone in software to read).

Quality is Free