How modern engineering principles reinforce each other

Last time, I tried to made a case on why I believe readability, testability, isolation, traceability and discoverability should be the foundations for writing testable and maintainable code. Another perspective, one that I often use in my workshops, is to show how modern engineering practices contribute to those five aspects of our profession. Here’s a map of those principles and how they reinforce each other.

A lot of developers don’t realize how these practices all fit together. So let’s look at an example from the diagram below, the speed and thoroughness of code reviews.

It all starts with the estimation process, which, to be completely open, I don’t care about. They will be wrong anyway. But the mere process of trying to come up with an estimate will force you to breakdown the work in bite-sized chunks your brain can assign an estimate to. A good breakdown has two big advantages. It creates opportunities for the team to swarm on the same work and thereby, for once, finish work before the end of the iteration ends. But it also increases the chance you end up with a pull request consisting of small and focused commits.

And such a pull request doesn’t require a lot of time to review, does it? And I’m sure it will be reviewed much more thoroughly. Just ask yourself, what do you do when you’re asked…