Surprise. Flawed Software Gums Up the Works
October 12, 2022
Did you ever hear the quote, “A man is only as good as his tools”? The quote usually applies to skilled laborers, doctors, athletes, teachers, etc. It can also work for anyone who relies on a computer hooked up to a network for work. Jacob Kaplan-Moss of the Jacobian blog posted a piece entitled, “Quality Is Systemic” which discusses how poorly designed software is the result of a poorly designed system. He negates that individual performance has a strong impact on a system.
Kaplan-Moss suggests that mediocre programmers working within a structure to design quality software will do so better than a group of phenomenal programmers who are working in a system with other goals in mind. He defines quality as documented, well-factored, and edited codebases, well-designed testing harnesses, easy-to-use high-fidelity development, and staging environments, a blameless workplace, and no toxic work relationships. He continues that humans and technical factors are important to establish a virtuous cycle for systemic quality:
“ Great tests catch errors before they become problems, but those tests don’t magically come into existence; they require a structure that affords the time and space to write tests.
That structure works because engineers are comfortable speaking up when they need some extra time to get the tests right.
- Engineers are comfortable speaking up because they work in an environment with high psychological safety.
- That environment exists in part because they know that production failures are seen as systemic failures, and individuals won’t be punished, blamed, or shamed.
- Outages are treated as systemic because most of them are. That’s because testing practices are so good that individual errors are caught long before they become impactful failures.”
The post ends with suggestions to reevaluate work environment toxicity and not concentrate on hiring the best, instead focus on building a system that makes great results and encourages individual performance. Moss-Kaplan’s suggestions are ideal for any workplace, but they are almost too good to be true for the US.
Whitney Grace, October 12, 2022
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