Some things that might help you make better software (2016)
The economics of software are broken as the article somewhat suggests, but this is less simple than the article suggests.<p>First of all most software developers have no idea what a quality software developer is until they see somebody who delivers 10x productivity and even then they still cannot typically extract what makes that one developer so much more productive.  This blindness is often present in organizations that don&#x27;t know how to hire or who value their subjective considerations over objective criteria.<p>Secondly, there is little or no incentive to hire a good developer.  A greater developer may deliver up to 4-10x productivity on only a 2-3x salary, but it also typically costs more to find good developers.  This problem is deeply compounded by the previous point in that many organizations cannot identify what a good developer is.<p>Third, most organizations don&#x27;t want high quality software.  They want software that is popular and appealing to entry level developers.  As an example search just about any article for <i>simple versus easy</i> and then consider what you are reading against some of the processes, configurations, and piles of abstractions you have to go through at work to make things easier.<p>Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, most organizations cannot account for economic considerations until they become huge, as in retaining hundreds or even thousands of developers.  Economics, particular software economics, is not something vision that is well understood either academically or in practice.<p>I mostly agree with the rest of article except for the extreme praise of <i>code coverage</i>.  Artificially boosting code coverage with unnecessary tests is one of the greatest contributors to tech debt, as all tests are ultimately debt never seen or appreciated by the end user.  Code coverage  does not account for whether tests are positive versus negative tests, whether collisions of features uncover unexpected behavior, or test quality.  It also, in many cases, does not even account for whether the code is working.  It isn&#x27;t supposed to.  Code coverage simply lets you know what code is unnecessary to your automation.<p>Instead think of covering code like this:<p>* If there is critical code there should be some manner of test automation to account for it in the various ways it is executed by a user.  If that critical code is removed existing tests should break, the code is actually not critical at all, or you have missing tests.  Developers should be rewarded for removing unnecessary code.<p>* Tests take time to write and execute.  That wasted time is a form of debt.  This wastes people time.  You want to ensure the software works correctly and that features do not introduce untended defects or regression but you don&#x27;t want to spend more developer time on test execution than writing software.  I have seen this at a major .com.<p>* Code coverage is useful to determine what code is executed during testing and what code isn&#x27;t.  That is all it is useful for.  When tests are written to artificially boost code coverage analysis the analysis becomes a meaningless way for developers to justify increased effort without contributing value back to the application.  Instead, use code coverage analysis to make decisions about what code to remove, refactor, or rearrange.