Development

A few years ago, a company I worked for was suffering from quality problems. We were expanding into new areas, pushing the product in new directions, and releasing new features quickly. As we pushed out new and evolved products, quality declined. Everything came to a head when customers began openly complaining about software quality. Our CTO stepped in with a mandate to solve the quality problem. His approach? The Zero Bug Policy — no-one was allowed to work on new features until the number of bugs in the product backlog was zero....

The request was fairly simple — iterate through some data and update some dates. Something as simple as this. for entry in db.query(): entry.date = entry.date + timedelta(days=10) entry.put() Unfortunately, the NoSQL database we were using did not support schemas and, unbeknownst to me, some data had been changed in unexpected ways on production. Something as simple as this. Notice the Outlier? My code seemed correct. Unit tests passed. Code review passed....

Metrics-Driven Development is an emerging term developing from the practices of continuous integration, continuous delivery, dev ops, and agile software methodologies. This article serves to define what metrics-driven development is, why it is useful, and how to use it to drive software changes. Let’s start with a definition of metrics-driven development. Metrics-Driven Development (MDD) The use of real-time metrics to drive rapid, precise, and granular software iterations. This definition is simple and straightforward, but does leave room for interpretation....