This article is very rambling and somehow manages to miss the most important driver of reduced software quality: shifting requirements.
You can have the most beautiful perfect design that leverages the greatest abstractions in the world, and then have it all entirely destroyed by a single requirement shift that totally kills your abstractions.
well you cannot design for the unpredictable, but well designed code is going to make refactoring easier anyways
If the design is so inflexible that a single requirement shift destroys it, then it wasn't a good design.
Completely untrue. Every design can be destroyed by a single poorly-thought out requirement. I can take down Facebook's design just by saying "any edit must immediately be visible to all users".
That's a refutation of agile, Vibe Coding and the last 25 years of the software industry.
One of my own quality metrics that almost everyone rejects is a "a good design is a design where a change that seems like a small change to management is... a small change"
It plays out like this. To get to product-market fit you are going to have to zig and zag 20 times. Everybody optimizes for the first step of this journey and then on the second step they optimize for that... and by step 5 or so the archiecture is exhausted and you have no hope of getting to step 20. The rare team that is looking ahead 20 steps is the one that survives.
If there is a place that is hiring and cares about Software Quality, I'll take a 70% paycut to work there.
You would have liked the last place I worked before retirement. Full-on software test team and everything. Private offices, too. Don't get me wrong, there were warts (oh, were there warts), but overall it was a good time. It wasn't a 70% pay cut, but the cut was considerable in comparison to what I was accustomed to. I didn't care, I was nearing retirement, and my "I'd take a pay cut if..." was the aforementioned private office.
But the company got sold to a conglomerate before I left, so I can't guarantee that culture is still there.
I've just accepted the fact that every tech company is just a dumpster fire.
Gene Kim wrote the DevOps Handbook and I think was at least involved in the related DORA and Phoenix Project and Unicorn Project office narrative books. Between those and the Google SRE book, I feel very well placed to have continuing value in the SDLC pipeline for wrangling the oncoming armies of Jr Developers-as-AI-agents-and-sometimes-humans into alignment. I also recommend System Design Interview 1 and 2 books by Xu for logical system design refurbishment, Designing Data Intensive Applications for most company programs, and Hexagonal Architecture Explained by Cockburn for finally getting something as small as a class or module to something as large as an entire Information System to have clear modular boundaries, without needing to do fuzzy pattern matching around half-remembered SOLID principles and GoF design patterns or trying to blindly apply 12 factor app design principles.
Quality used to take a back seat because there was so much legwork to do. AI has reduced the cost to be excellent, so let's be as excellent as our environments let us.
Testing is not "Quality Assurance".
If I got nothing else out of TFA, at least I could raise my hands and shout an "amen!".
Maybe we could take a page from the SWEBOK here, which contains a lot of previous thinking on this topic.
That’s great, but how do I fix my motorcycle?
(2022)
(edited 2023) agreed mods should append a year given how fast things have been changing
Hey Siri, is my app doing what I wanted it to do?
Siri: Yes, but each action takes 10 minutes to resolve and your users are jumping out of their windows after dealing with your software.
Programmer: Great, my software works!
Hey Siri, my software isn't doing what I wanted it to do. Confirm PRD did not include 10 minute wait times and send my IQ test results again please.