- Author
- Aditya Athalye
- Published
- 20 January 2022 (updated 10 March 2023)
- Kind
- Personal essay on software quality, with a diagram and a reading list
- Original
- www.evalapply.org/posts/how-to-not-die-by-a-thousand-cuts/index.html
- Subject
- Software tools and craft
- Themes
- Taste and judgment, How things break
What it is
Aditya Athalye writes a personal blog. The essay asks what software quality is and who owns it. The author calls it a work in progress and not novel.
What it says
- The author defines quality as the experience of the process, done with grace.
- Software is pure concept, and most of it must change because the world does.
- The author suggests quality assurance may belong to every function, not one group.
- A strictly linear workflow front-loads risk at analysis, and delayed feedback makes errors costly.
- Every hotfix, complaint, crash and outage is a cut that slowly destroys value.
- The author lists quality-destroying habits, such as treating testing as quality assurance.
- No best-practice process can fix broken systems and people, so the way must be co-evolved.
What evidence it gives
The essay offers argument, experience and a hand-drawn ASCII diagram of cost against time. It lists example scenarios and quality-destroying phrases the author has heard. It gives no measurements or studies of its own.
Interests and limits
This is one practitioner's intuition, which the author says is a work in progress. No data supports the claims. The enterprise and consumer product table is mostly left unfinished. The reading list is a sampler, not an argument.