Uncle Bob Might Be Right, but Context Matters

He might be right in his context, but there is no silver bullet.

Some of us are less fortunate and work in companies where every deadline was yesterday. Every task is wildly different and often means jumping into someone else’s project that you are seeing for the first time. You don’t get unit tests. You don’t get proper documentation. You don’t get decent architecture. You don’t get any of the safeguards he is talking about. You get a Jira ticket and someone asking why it isn’t done yet.

The team that owns the project keeps it running like a broken company car. Nobody wants to fix it because there is always something more urgent. Then six months later you are somehow expected to apply all the best practices that should have been there from day one.

In that environment, making all of this a prerequisite for shipping is a pretty good way to end up on a PIP. And then out of a job.

I’m not saying he is wrong. I’m saying his argument assumes an engineering culture and organizational discipline that a lot of developers simply do not have. And more importantly, their companies have absolutely no intention of introducing.

“Just add tests, static analysis, architecture constraints and automated verification” sounds great until you are the person who has to introduce all of that into a 10 year old dumpster fire while being told the deadline is tomorrow.

There is no silver bullet. Sometimes you are just trying to ship the damn thing.