"There's no foresight. There's no planning." Couple that with "as an expression of agility," and it really rings true to me. I've worked in enough shops where the contractual obligations preclude any ability to slow down and put together a plan. A culture where you're forced to go from an angry phone call from the suits to something running in production in mere hours is a culture that finds building bookcases out of mashed potatoes acceptable.
The best environment I've ever worked in was, ironically enough, fully invested in Scrum, but it wasn't what's typical in the industry. Notably, we had no bug tracker[0], and for the most part, everyone was expected to work on one thing together[1]. We also spent an entire quarter out of the year doing nothing but planning, roleplaying, and actually working in the business problem domain. Once we got the plan together, the expectation was to proceed with it, with the steps executed in the order we agreed to, until we had to re-plan[2].
With the rituals built in for measuring and re-assessing whether our plan was the right one through, e.g., sprint retrospectives, we were generally able to work tomorrow's opportunity into the plan that we had. With the understanding that successfully delivering everything we'd promised at the end of the sprint was a coin toss, if we were succeeding a lot, it gave us the budget to blow a sprint or two on chasing FOMO and documenting what we learned.
0: How did we address bugs without a bug tracker? We had a support team that could pull our andon cord for us whenever they couldn't come up with a satisfactory workaround (based on how agonizing it was for everyone involved) to behavior that was causing someone a problem. Their workarounds got added to the product documentation, and we got a product backlog item, usually put at the top of the backlog so it'd be addressed in the next sprint, to make sure that the workaround was, e.g., tested enough such that it wouldn't break in subsequent revisions of the software. Bad enough bugs killed the sprint and sent us to re-plan. We tracked the product backlog with Excel.
1: Think pairing but scaled up. It's kinda cheesy at first, but with everyone working together like this, you really do get a lot done in a day, and mentoring comes for free.
2: As it went: Re-planning is re-work, and re-work is waste.
I've had a lot of experiences like this, and I wound up ducking out of the industry entirely in 2021 after having had my skillset reduced to dogmatic use of the infrastructure buzzword of the day.
A lot of newer[0] US domestic market manual transmission cars do, in fact, have an interlock that prevents the starter motor from getting power without the clutch pedal also being depressed. Of particular note, my 1984 Ford Bronco II, 1991 Mitsubishi Galant, and 2004 Honda Accord all had such an interlock.
0: This is basically everything after the three-on-the-tree/four-on-the-floor era. I have yet to drive anything with an overdrive gear that didn't require popping the clutch to crank the starter.
Georgia HB 87 (2011) and its unintended consequences say otherwise. While the H-2A is indeed popular, there are still a staggering number of people working these jobs who are here illegally.
It's all part of the actuarial mindset. The entire point of the exercise is to arrive at a model of reality that has some degree of predictive power.
> For me the only things that scare me are in the "I have no data on that" category.
I feel exactly the same way. It means that I have no idea what those things will wind up costing me, and that's the anxiety trigger as far as I'm concerned.
I'm also on team Keep An Eye On Things™, and approximately none of it really feeds into an anxiety loop. (There's a tiny sliver of the pie that does, but it's easy enough to talk myself off that ledge and go engage in a Weltschmerzspaziergang[0].)
I know it's stuff I can't control, and that's sort of the point. I want to know what I can't control so that I can know what I can control, if that makes sense.
> There's something very, very wrong in the way we write programs nowadays.
I largely agree, but...
> ... the database is you main source of invariants.
I guess my upbringing through strict typing discipline leaves me questioning this in particular. I'm able to encode these things in my types without consulting my database at build time and statically verify that my data are as they should be as they traverse my system with not really any extra ceremony.
Encoding that in the database is nice (and necessary), but in the interest of limiting network round-trips (particularly in our cloud-oriented world), I really would prefer that my app can get its act together first before crossing the machine boundary.
> If your unit tests have some overlap on your integration tests, that's nbd especially seeing as you can run your unit tests in parallel.
Exactly.
Another upside I've run into while doing things this way is that it gets me out of being relational database-brained. Sometimes, you really do not need the full-blown relational data model when a big blob of JSON will work just fine.
> The only thing enforcing these invariants in production is the interplay between your database schema and the queries you execute against it."
I'm unsure that I agree. The two examples you gave, establishing that IDs are unique and that updates to entities in the system are serializable (and linearizable while we're here), are plenty doable without having to touch the real database. (In fact, as far as the former is concerned, this dual approach to testing is what made me adopt having a wholly separate "service"[0] in my applications for doling out IDs to things. I used to work in a big Kafka shop that you've almost certainly heard of, and they taught me how to deal with the latter.)
That said, I'd never advocate for just relying on one approach over the other. Do both. Absolutely do both.
> I'm pretty sure "don't repeat yourself" thinking has led to the vast majority of the bad ideas I've seen so far in my career. It's a truly crippling brainworm, and I wish computer schools wouldn't teach it.
I brought up WET mostly to comment that, if there's one place in software development where copying and pasting is to be encouraged, testing is it. I'd like to shelve the WET vs. DRY debate as firmly out of scope for this thread if that's alright.
0: It's a service inasmuch as an instance of a class implementing an interface can be a service, but it opens up the possibility of more easily refactoring to cross over into running against multiple databases later.
I think it's probably worth mentioning that the principal concern for tests should be proving out the application's logic, and unless you're really leaning on your database to be, e.g., a source of type and invariant enforcement for your data, any sort of database-specific testing can be deferred to integration and UAT.
I use both the mocked and real database approaches illustrated here because they ultimately focus on different things: the mocked approach validates that the model is internally consistent with itself, and the real database approach validates that the same model is externally consistent with the real world.
It may seem like a duplication of effort to do that, but tests are where you really should Write Everything Twice in a world where it's expected that you Don't Repeat Yourself.
I use names from various books, in no particular fashion. Most of my names are from Tad Williams books, but I've been known to use the names of Anne McCaffrey's dragons as well, with some names from Norse mythology tossed in for good measure.
My current workstation is pfefirrit. In the past, I've had fizz, click, karthwine, ninebirds, nuzzledark, nipslither, bast-imret, earnotch, and knet-makri as servers. My old workstations were cloudleaper, bite-then-bark, pop, hushpad, and tailchaser. My firewall was meerclar.
As far as laptops go, I've used munin, hugin, odin, krelli, skoggi, krauka, nrefa-o, mnanth, and caylith.
Back when I did IT for a couple of schools, I used chemical compounds in a certain fashion to reflect room numbers.