We must deliver bug-free code before someone kills a thousand people and governments legislate coding!!

Ultrabugbestofplus — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 13:04:42 +0000

Also we need to not kill people in the first place obviously.

You think because you don't write code that will run a plane or medical equipment its ok if there are some bugs in it?

Imagine one guy writing the code to stabilize an offshore oil rig. He made a mistake and a faulty "if" statement claimed the lives of most workers on the rig. As a result, hundreds died or were unaccounted for.

Politicians will shake their heads and dramatically ask for answers. If you think the programmer can get away with "My boss was pressuring me delivering this code I didn't have the time to test it", you are most probably wrong. He will go to jail. But more importantly, the politicians will make laws on how to code.

What language you use, the procedure to deploy new code to production, what signatures from who to get etc. They will make those laws themselves because we have no unified standard for coding in a reliable way. Not everyone in the software industry knows about TDD. Not everyone in the industry knows about unit testing (let alone integration, end-to-end, etc.).

So the idea is to be able to say to those politicians: "Look, what happened to this oil rig is a tragedy. But we have coding standards already in place that the vast majority of the professionals in the software industry already follow. This guy either didn't follow/ignored them."

And so the politicians are going to take what is in place to make the laws instead of making their own.

So in conclusion: BY CODING AND FOLLOWING AT LEAST SOME FORM OF TDD YOU ENSURE A DUMB LAW FREE FUTURE FOR THE SOFTWARE ENGINEERING.

Also, see this talk with uncle Bob, he explains the concepts here better than I do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EmboKQH8lM

DEV Community: Ultrabugbestofplus

We must deliver bug-free code before someone kills a thousand people and governments legislate coding!!