Are We Building Software We No Longer Understand?
January 21, 2019Thirty years ago I was building apps that were anything but simple, yet they existed in a simple environment: we shipped them on floppy disks to run on a Mac. There were no service interactions and we were a single team than controlled all the code. It was possible to know what everything did.
Today I work for a massive non-technology company (though we create a lot of software and systems for our own use) and our problems are increasing to the point that unexpected failures are a common occurrence, both on the service side and even in our mainstream mobile applications. The sum of everything is becoming almost chaotic in nature.
Our software is not the product itself, but is very important to the success of the real business. Yet as more and more things are built, upgraded, changed or moved around, the failures are becoming more numerous, delays in shipping longer, and our ability to respond to problems quickly less assured.