Building Reliable Software

Your responsibility as a software developer building software for customers, you are expected to contribute in the development of hopefully a reliable application, where you may give away the ability to experiment.

When building reliable software, you are building predictable software, where most of the outcomes are expected and where bugs are reported for unexpected behaviors in your code.

During the development cycle of the application, you have to step back to ensure that there is cohesiveness in the codebase from across multiple contributors. Tools like formatting, linting and styling guides help, but there needs to be an understanding of the product requirements to make sure the code of your application stays predictable and understandable.

Depending on the size of the application you are working, a system of checks and balances are in place. This does not mean you offload the testing to another team, but if you miss a requirement, there will be another person finding the missed requirement. This also applies when working on agreed contracts from external resources, it is the responsibility of everyone to ensure the application stays predictable.

As a developer, an individual contributor, you need to care for the product you are building. When you care you will strive into delivering a reliable piece of software.