There exists a recent and disturbing trend in the software quality space for people to view themselves as “test automation engineers” or similar, and to focus on creating large automation suites post-hoc. These suites are normally generated verbatim from acceptance criteria and mapped directly to UI-automation tests. The guiding principle appears to be that no bug shall ever reach production. While this goal is noble in theory, it’s destructive in practice. Worse, however, it also distracts us from the realisation that software quality is about much more than testing.

In this talk, we’ll cover a number of other, often-overlooked elements of software quality such as code design itself, monitoring, logging, instrumentation, SRE, synthetic transactions and production verification tests. We’ll look at production error rates and how to assess what an acceptable error rate is, and we’ll cover measures such as mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to remediation (MTTR) as key metrics for the overall quality of a solution. Critically, we’ll then put that into the context of what the system’s purpose is and whether that system is Good Enough.

Target audience

CTOs, Heads of Engineering, technical leaders

Approximate duration

60 minutes including questions

Talk video

Here’s a version of “Good Enough” Software that I delivered at Evolution by ThoughtWorks in Sydney and Melbourne in 2018.