During and after Craft Conference I’ve been thinking a lot about the quality of software. Not weird, since it’s my profession, but I was thinking about it in a more abstract way. During the conference, more than one speaker announced that ‘all software is crap’. And it made me think: is that true? Will it always be that way?
In the 19th century, it was still not common for doctors to wash their hands in between patients, with a lot of unnecessary deaths as a consequence. For us, that now seems ridiculous, but when Semmelweis presented his findings in 1847 the doctors didn’t believe him. They were offended by his suggestions. Even real empirical evidence couldn’t persuade them to wash their hands. What a bunch of arrogant idiots.
And yet….when you think about it…isn’t that how we are building software? We think we don’t need to wash our hands (= testing) in between patients (= building user stories) because it takes too much time. We are lazy. We shake off the people who insist we should wash our hands or else shit will hit the fan. And shit hits the fan in the form of technical debt, assumptions we made that proved to be incorrect and so on.
I hope that in due time, testing will be like washing your hands in between patients. It will be wired into everyone’s brain to do it. It will be wired into everyone’s brain to stop being lazy and not deliver crap anymore. Wishful thinking? Perhaps…but I strive for it and hope other people do too.
You can also draw parallels with the railway industry.
Today’s software industry has been around about as long as railways had in the 1860s. Look at the safety record back in those days; typically many multiple-fatality crashes a year, with crude and error-prone signalling system, unreliable braking systems, wooden carriages with gas lighting that got smashed to matchwood and then went up in flames in relatively low-speed collisions. That’s where IT is today, especially Internet security.
It took a century and a half of learning from experience for things to get better. But also compare the aviation industry’s safety today with that of the 1970s.