Are you driven by fear?
In the Midst of a Pandemic
We are still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and so fear is a common topic today. Fear inevitably comes out when faced with such a situation. It is a fearful time.
Yet, we do not need to be driven by fear. Take sensible precautions, of course. But the fear does not need to rule you. We have the ability to analyze situations, to logically determine opportune courses of action. We do not need to be so afraid of living our lives that we will just blindly accept somebody else’s opinion on how we should live.
Software Development
Now let’s bring this into the topic of software development. Fear can be subtly pervasive in our environments too. Are you too afraid to touch some piece of code, because it might break x? Or that it might disrupt customer y? We might put tests in place to help alleviate some of those fears.
Yet when you look into the Test Driven Development practice, its primary purpose is not to act as a safety net. That is no doubt a bonus, and probably why a good portion of developers start to dig into the practice. But at its core, its primary purpose is to help you design better code.
What other practices may have been introduced out of fear, but primarily have other benefits? Or were designed for other purposes? Chaos engineering tor chaos testing is a great practice to analyze. Did this grow out of fear, or really in the face of fear? Turning on a Chaos Monkey in a production environment seems very scary, but you do it so you don’t have to be ruled by a fear of breaking things in the long run.