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The Single Most Important Driver Of Software Quality

Lucas Medeiros Reis on June 02, 2017

So, there I was, ready to press the button. All the while three hundred people were looking at me, thinking "is this guy going to make my work more...
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Blaine Osepchuk

Yes, Lucas. I know the feeling. I work for a small business and I'm acutely aware that it will take less than five minutes to track me down if I break our production server because there are only two programmers in the whole company and I'm one of them.

We're not perfect but we find process is our biggest driver of quality:

  • don't change code you don't understand
  • never merge a branch with known defects
  • we use checklists to make sure we've solved the whole problem
  • everything runs through static analysis tools
  • everything gets code reviewed
  • we test (automated and manual)
  • we make small changes and iterate