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Discussion on: Hypothesis-Driven Development

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fransafu profile image
Francisco Javier Sánchez Fuentes • Edited

Hi Alex,

A time ago I started to learn about the Driven Development like Testing, Observability, etc. My point is... What do you think about all those kind of "Driven Development" in essence, it's a part of the development process?

Regards!!!

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alexbunardzic profile image
Alex Bunardzic • Edited

Hi Francisco,

Thank you for the brilliant question! I think that software development must be driven. There is more than one way to skin a cat, as the saying goes, so no surprise that we have at our disposal more than one way to drive software development. But without driving it, we are doomed to fall into the dreaded waterfall death march, where most software development initiatives never deliver on the expectations.

One may ask: how come we don't have -Driven Development in other engineering disciplines, only in software? It's because other branches of engineering are faced with much lower levels of uncertainty. When engineering physical objects/systems. it is much cleared what are we building and what are the actual physical constraints (for example, when building a bridge).

With software, we don't enjoy such privileges, and we therefore must proceed much more cautiously. Meaning, we must be driven by some discipline which will keep our development efforts on the straight and narrow.

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fransafu profile image
Francisco Javier Sánchez Fuentes

Alex,

Great conclusion and you're right. Software development has a high level of uncertainty.

Thanks for the reply, I'll stick with the main idea for my learning path :)