Ask HN: What is the hand-washing of development?

[deanebarker]

I'm reading "Better" by Atul Gawande about how physicians and medical care can improve.

He cites hand-washing as one of the simplest and most effective ways to prevent complications from hospital stays. He writes about how it's universally effective at reducing infections, but still doesn't get implemented for dozens of different reasons (including laziness).

What is the "hand-washing of development"? What is a simple practice that, when universally and consistently braced by a development team, always results in higher quality output with fewer defects?

Put another way, what are we most often not doing that we COULD do and know that we SHOULD do?

[davismwfl]

I like this question, but it is hard to define one that is global to all projects.

Without putting much thought into it though, I'd say the hand washing of development is source control. Most projects know they need source control so do some parts of it, but don't use it to properly make reproducible software builds consistently. And sadly I have ran into a lot of people still not using source control, which blows my mind.

[karmakaze]

Mature devops. Let's say we have a CI/CD pipeline that runs tests and deploys to prod if tests pass and it all happens in a few minutes without further interaction. Given this, you may opt to write better tests, have more coverage, watch deploys when they happen. Also, nothing gets to prod without a automated, repeatable, logged process.

[pedasmith]

Using source code control. Ever so many things become easier, and yet there are still teams that have never heard of it.

[kristianp → pedasmith]

This, and regular checkins.

[cjbprime]

Not releasing to production on Friday afternoons? :)