The Software Reformation

Ivan Houston
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

It feels like we are living in a time of history that will be noted as a change in era for Software Development.

Agile and XP practices are radically changing the structure of our companies and teams.

Micro service and Event Sourcing Architectures in the Cloud are changing our time to market.

Almost everything is being made available As A Service.

Programming Practice such as Pairing, TDD and BDD are changing how we determine the customer need and write the code and tests, among other things.

Yet with most of these there is not always something new. It is getting back to basic long standing practice and principles.

I draw a number of parallels to it to some of the fundamental principles of Martin Luther, the Roman Catholic Priest whose actions were key to the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago.

No Theological Debates being made here ;)

Martin Luther wanted to get back to the basic principles and remove a lot of the non-value add practices and ideas that had been added on over the years.

He wanted people to self-study and not simply go with practices and teaching from others.

As we eagerly embrace the new software practices and methodologies let’s make sure that we understand the reasons and thinking behind them and think for ourselves.

FaaS (Functions as a Service) and exposing APIs have very similar thinking to how we used Design By Contract principles.

TDD — at its heart aids us in breaking down our logic into single purpose methods and functions and the ability to define good test cases.

You can say you are doing TDD but if you do not add basic test cases such as edge case tests you will still miss things.

I am sure many of you can think on other examples….

As lots of new things come along:

Many are not “new”

All need to be evaluated

Back to Basics



)

Ivan Houston

Written by

Working with People in the World of Software

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade