Testing And Scale - Daniel Bell

This resource first appeared in issue #35 on 31 Jul 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development, Strategy: Research to Development Maturity Ladder, Technical Leadership: Testing

This is a short read talking about the difference in the need for testing at the initial, exploratory phase of coding (where detailed testing is brittle and slows you down) as opposed to the stage of development where the code is being used for real things (where lack of detailed coding makes the codebase brittle because it can’t be easily safely modified). This this is particularly relevant to research software development, where I’ve argued a maturity model is a useful way to look at software. (Incidentally, there’s an upcoming SORSE talk on maturity in social sciences research data services that I’m excited for).