The Cobra Effect

I've never really liked testing. This has not been a psychically easy position to hold.  What does the internet have to say about testing? A billion is just a number---much harder to discount are the myriad reports of smart people that tests are essential , there is no  other way to approach things, any piece of software without tests is an unworkable piece of crap. I respect these people.  How to resolve this? Things made more sense when I realized that most of my work has been greenfield---and not just greenfield, but not part of a system .  Part of the work was figuring out what to build in the first place, what the software should even do . In that environment, tests lose a lot of their value.  Automated testing in particular---the key value proposition of automated testing is that every time the tests run, you get that for free.  Multiply it over a lot of runs and a lot of time and that adds up.  But with independent, experimental so...

I'll be looking for a new job soon, readers! And this has been cause for some reflection. In Emeryville, CA, there is an "international food hall" called the Public Market .  "International food hall" is not a common phrase, because international food halls are not common buildings. But it is basically a food court leveled up a few times---a food court, if you made it eight times the size and gave it its own building. The software world is kind of like this:  a lot of people with very different worldviews crammed in together. What, in your  opinion, are the core concepts of this whole software thing?  The real  important stuff? If you look around, people seem to have very different answers to this, or answers-in-the-form-of-a-culture.  For some it's "agility," for others it's "testing," for others it's "optimization."  Steve Jobs (at least at first) would probably have said it's "empowering creativity...