For software engineers, a vote for quality isn’t always on the institutional ballot. Sometimes (too often) the sole metric for success is speed. The directive goes: Get your code out the door ASAP and leave the pesky testing to quality assurance. In fact, in many organizations, QA exists as a separate office from development, with stilted communication stumbling sporadically between the two groups.
But while the powers that be may have deemed this separation optimal for deploying at hyper speed, it ultimately works to the detriment of the software’s short-term readability and long-term extensibility. To optimize those two elements, quality must belong to everyone, perhaps even especially to developers. If you’re a software engineer and your organization doesn’t expect it from you, it’s still in your best interest to both prioritize and promote quality code.
