People create software, not tools. Not even AI tools.
Good software practice and craftsmanship begin with simple techniques leading to better, more effective and more supportable code. Good design practice, good architecture, and suitable testing methodologies pay dividends in fewer outages and improved customer experience.
Advice about how to create ‘better software’ is abundant and often freely available. But there is so much advice where do you start?
I found this out for myself when I started reviewing some of the books and articles on the subject. Do you focus on the team, focus on development practice or testing or TDD? Can you use SOLID and DRY safely with microservices?
So I came up with a simple way of reducing this down to a simple list. This is what QUEST is all about.
- Quality (is everyone’s responsibility and should be “top of mind”)
- Unrestricted (you and your team should have the freedom to do what you need to do to accomplish your work)
- End-User (everything we build is for the customer)
- Simplicity (in architecture, design and code)
- Team (collaboration at its heart – mindful development, pair programming, mob programming)
Rather than purely relying on processes or tools, ensure the whole organisation understands how you build software. When building quality software, it takes discipline and commitment to make great software together every single day.
I discussed this more at the We Are Developers World Congress in July ’23. The slides for this talk are available here.
Want to know more about this approach to building quality software through quality teams? Feel free to get in touch.