Aiming for the Right Target

Release It! Second Edition — Pragmatic Programmers (9 / 143)

👈 Chapter 1 Living in Production | TOC | The Scope of the Challe nge 👉

Most software is designed for the development lab or the testers in the QA department. It is designed and built to pass tests such as, “The customer’s first and last names are required, but the middle initial is optional.” It aims to survive the artificial realm of QA, not the real world of production.

Software design today resembles automobile design in the early ’90s — disconnected from the real world. Cars designed solely in the cool comfort of the lab looked great in models and CAD systems. Perfectly curved cars gleamed in front of giant fans, purring in laminar flow. The designers inhabiting these serene spaces produced designs that were elegant, sophisticated, clever, fragile, unsatisfying, and ultimately short-lived. Most software architecture and design happens in equally clean, distant environs.

Do you want a car that looks beautiful but spends more time in the shop than on the road? Of course not! You want to own a car designed for the real world. You want a car designed by somebody who knows that oil changes are always 3,000 miles late, that the tires must work just as well on the last sixteenth of an inch of tread as on the first, and that you will certainly, at some point, stomp on the brakes while holding an Egg McMuffin in one hand and a phone in the other.

When our system passes QA, can we say with confidence that it’s ready for production? Simply passing QA tells us little about the system’s suitability for the next three to ten years of life. It could be the Toyota Camry of software, racking up thousands of hours of continuous uptime. Or it could be the Chevy Vega (a car whose front end broke off on the company’s own test track) or the Ford Pinto (a car prone to blowing up when hit in just the right way). It’s impossible to tell from a few days or even a few weeks of testing what the next several years will bring.

Product designers in manufacturing have long pursued “design for manufacturability” — the engineering approach of designing products such that they can be manufactured at low cost and high quality. Prior to this era, product designers and fabricators lived in different worlds. Designs thrown over the wall to production included screws that could not be reached, parts that were easily confused, and custom parts where…

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