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by jakevoytko 14 days ago
It's very simple; If you work 10x faster, you need to release 1/10th the bugs as before for the user's experience to have the same level of bugginess. And we're not incentivized for this; we're still exploring how to ship 10x faster and not exploring how to meet our users' needs 10x better (often conflating the two!)

And I mean, go tell your leadership "Those projects that used to take us a full quarter? Now we can do them in 6 weeks." You don't get the rest of the quarter to stabilize your codebase. Now you jam 2 releases into the quarter.

3 comments

This is why i dont work in a company when engineering manager does not have engineering background
Shipping a lot faster definitely puts a big strain on the QA side of the house. But I'm not at all convinced that things have gotten worse even with "AI slop". CI/CD and releasing features more quickly has long been proven to make software more reliable rather than less. But to work, it requires much much better test coverage. CI/CD and AI code go hand in hand. It's all about the test coverage. Not enough tests, then exactly as you are saying: ship 10x the bugs (which actually means your software will fail catastrophically). And you mention leadership (and others did too). Here's my view: if your company leadership doesn't care about software quality, then it doesn't matter if you used Fable, or agile, or 10 year old agile, the software won't be great. You'll never have the time to do things well.
That doesn't explain the observation of things that used to work breaking though, without any new features!