Quality Myth in Software Engineering
High-quality civil engineering is a slow-moving process with little to no tolerance for errors. Planning & execution is done with knowledge gathered over the centuries.
Very similar but faster-paced, testing of mechanical engineering products are by the books; with compliances defined and regulated by external organizations. Examples of such organizations for any general products would be CE in Europe or ISI in India. Also, sometimes the regulators are specific to a kind like the helmet industry uses FIM, ECE, Snell, or DOT. Manufacturers can build and sell any product as long as it passes the quality tests defined by the regulators. And regulators often grade the product's quality for the convenience of consumers as well.
The Electrical and Electronics industry partially overlaps with the software engineering testing strategies, but still has compliances to follow and is required to undergo regulations before appearing on shelves for consumers.
Where software engineering is so unique! One of our biggest tech giant had this motto on its walls —
Move FAST — change things rapidly and openly experiment
and BREAK things — the fixes are anyway quick and from the comfort of sitting on a desk (also no cares as long as it's free)
There are no standards, guidelines, or quality measurements for software. An app is as good as its brand, marketing, & the sway of public emotions.
There are regulators like PCI & GDPR when sensitive data or real money is involved. But the internet is free and open, and these regulators only covering the tip of the iceberg — are not nearly able to restrict access to unprotected or unregulated app usage.
why is that?
Partly because software is virtual, the quality assessment tools are also virtual, and these tools bend at will very easily.
But mostly because the software industry just wants to move fast (not needs to) wants to move fast with their laser-focused profound goal of becoming a unicorn — *1 billion valuation!
A Unicorn company is not necessarily a company with high-quality products, employee satisfaction, well-being, sustainability to nature, privacy & ethics but just 1 billion in valuation—so like Amazon but not Amazon
Chasing this through-ball in the field of cut-throat competing defenders leads to a rapidly changing code in the software — which does not have any standard tools or benchmarks to assess the quality —and completely left at the mercy of table genius managers & the developers — these software breaks, a lot.
Hence, software engineering is incomparable to laws of other engineering streams — If a building undergoes new developments every month like software will have impossible to maintain structural integrity. Or an automobile manufacturer constantly changing a car’s parts or design will never see the daylight of production or homologation. Or an electronic company rolling out upgrades every month will suffocate itself in providing aftersale service.
While our giant indeed took a due proper step, I hope for the whole industry to follow —
