1 Working and valuable: Gearing your process for continuous feedback
In this chapter, you will learn
- A philosophy for effective software development
- Why feedback matters when building software
- About the example application we'll be building in this book
This is a book about delivering software at a rapid pace. But it isn’t just about being a fast coder. By itself being able to write code quickly is not a worthy goal. It’s not even a useful goal.
As a software developer you must be able to produce code that is working, reliable and valuable in a reasonable time frame.
If you can't write code that works, or if you can't write code that's valuable, there's little point being able to write code quickly. The real trick to moving at a rapid pace is to focus on the aspects of development that help you build your code the right way and indeed to make sure that it is the right code.
When we create broken code (it’s so easy to do) we stifle our future progress.
When we create unreliable code (again so easy), for example code that only runs on our computer but doesn’t work in production or doesn’t work on our customers’ devices, that’s code that by definition isn’t going to be useful.
When we travel far writing code in the wrong direction, the work we have done is ultimately wasted (which so often happens).