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Ask HN: How can I consistently deliver high-quality work with minimal issues?

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11–20 of 42 posts

Re: Ask HN: How can I consistently deliver high-quality work with minimal issues?

#11
You will continually get better at not just writing the right code, but at interpreting requirements into the right code. You will learn the edges and corners where bugs will hide. And sometimes you'll write them anyways, because that's life. You'll fix it in the future.

In this trade, a lot of orgs put a lot of emphasis on "sprints" and "deliverables", but you really have to look at software development as a continuum. Optimizations and bug fixes are a part of this continuum, and any good team has space for these things in planning.

Not all teams recognize this, however, and I would recommend discussing with the other engineers on your team how you can work together to advocate for this. No sprint can be 100% features. Software requires upkeep. Bugs are a natural part of this.

Re: Ask HN: How can I consistently deliver high-quality work with minimal issues?

#12
A big part of this is QA flagging the bugs. Humans make mistakes, and testing is there to catch them. The goal is not to ship the bugs to the customer, not to never make mistakes.

This does not mean that there is nothing you can do to prevent bugs, but try to let go of the idea that bugs should never reach QA. That's what they're there for, and if you add another layer of QA between your work and them, you've basically doubled the work done without improving anything that gets shipped to the customer. And all for the sake of your ego to never have a sprint go wrong.

Re: Ask HN: How can I consistently deliver high-quality work with minimal issues?

#14
Is it better than raw claude computer use like in this proof of concept?

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1glmle0/claude...

I'm sure that video is full of hallucinations, but it could be an interesting thing to benchmark the whole system just against a prompt with something like that.

Re: Ask HN: How can I consistently deliver high-quality work with minimal issues?

#15
Sounds to me like you need to do more testing. You should have automatic integration tests that run with your CI/CD pipeline to make sure you don't break seemingly unrelated bits, and most importantly you need to actually test the application like a real user - like QA will test it - before you merge. Writing code that works is only half the battle. You need to test it and get it ready for production before you merge. Most importantly you need a robust test suite with >90% coverage, to avoid breaking things by accident. Focus on making sure your code is stable, rather than trying to get each task done as quickly as possible.

Re: Ask HN: How can I consistently deliver high-quality work with minimal issues?

#17
This is literally what seniority/experience means.

This is why more experienced developers get paid more — because the deliver more consistent, higher quality, less issues work.

You work more, on more projects etc. and you eventually grow. Doesn't matter at all which tricks, approaches do you use.

The best investment in you quicker growth - is to find bigger, more complex and important project to tackle, and better team.

Re: Ask HN: How can I consistently deliver high-quality work with minimal issues?

#18
Daily scrums, code reviews, and close collaboration should lessen or keep mistakes at bay. I think working closely with the team and having someone to check your work, anticipate missteps early, and provide guidance helps. We can't expect to sit alone and release something great. It's a team sport.

Re: Ask HN: How can I consistently deliver high-quality work with minimal issues?

#20

This is literally what seniority/experience means. This is why more experienced developers get paid more — because the deliver more consistent, higher quality, less issues work. You work more, on more projects etc. and you eventually grow. Doesn't matter at all which tricks, approaches do you use. The best investment in you quicker growth - is to find bigger, more complex and important project to tackle, and better t…

Today I tested a feature in production that integrates with another system where I fetch how much to delay our data feed for some customers. I kinda remembered we were talking about the delay being an extra 5s but the numbers I got from their prod service amounted to an extra 30s. I flagged it up and it turned out all the other people on the team for the other service simply never checked that they actually input the correct data. Luckily they now have time until tomorrow to fix it.
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