The idea is that it does what it says on the tin, without fanfare, robustly, usably, accessibly, localizably, and dependably; providing a user experience that gets out of the way of the user, in a manner that does not surprise the user (even "good" surprises can be an issue. Boring software can be just what the doctor ordered).
In my book, that's the definition of "quality."
I'm working on an application that has been over a year in the making. Its functionality is something that I could have popped out in a month, but making sure of the Quality of the app has necessitated that I spend a great deal more time, "polishing the fenders."
If this were a commercial app (it isn't), then it would have been unbearably expensive for a startup.
I tend to write test harnesses in a day or two, that have similar levels of functionality to this application.
High Quality is significantly more expensive than even "decent, but lesser" quality.
I consider everything I do, "engineering." Been doing that, all my adult life.
Feel free to look at the stuff I do (I link to it in my HN profile). The app I'm working on isn't there (yet), but a number of its components are. It's still "under wraps."
I read a book, where one of the characters is a smith. It has this exchange, between him, and another character:
"Always do the very best job you can," he said on another occasion as he put a last few finishing touches with a file on the metal parts of a wagon tongue he was repairing.
"But that piece goes underneath," Garion said. "No one will ever see it."
"But I know it's there," Durnik said, still smoothing the metal. "If it isn't done as well as I can do it, I'll be ashamed every time I see this wagon go by -and I'll see the wagon every day.”I witness on a daily basis PRs that have no body getting merged with absolutely zero comments and a blanket approval as long as it passes our (broken) CI pipeline. I witness obvious poor quality in the code, but engineers want to seem like they are working and will just blanket approve PRs, while i'm in the middle of writing up my code review denying the PR.
If you are a developer on a team and want your codebase to be high quality, you end up no longer writing the code and instead spend all of your time gatekeeping via code reviews. This leads to burn out.
The obvious answer, is to hire experienced, skilled, capable engineers, and instill in them, the same reverence for Quality that you have.
Like I said, Quality is expensive. Very few companies like to pay the premium.
So I would say engineer is a poor term, but also the only one we've got for now.
What happens if you release it and it turns out that nobody likes it? I'd have preferred to spend a month releasing a lower-quality app, and then spent 11 months improving it (while people use it and I learn more about what they want) rather than take a year releasing a high-quality app nobody wants to use.
This assumes you aren't just building it for fun, though, in which case building it is the point, and you don't even need to release it afterwards.
But I also follow a development methodology that I call "paving the bare spots."[0] It adjusts the design, as the project progresses. Not for the faint of heart. It means that I may toss out a month's work, because it does not fit the user experience (which is under constant revision). We have also made a couple of major pivots, during the project, to fit new realities.
I have probably tossed out three months' worth of work, as the project has progressed. Happy to do so. The best code, is the code I don't write.
The nice thing is, is that the product is constantly at "ship" Quality. Makes demos, user testing, and begging for money, easier.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...
- [Probably erroneously] ascribed to Aristotle
But naysayers will say we are "bikeshedding."
Meh. Whatevs. I do things the way I do.
In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods see everywhere.
I’m not sure to which extent I agree with this piece’s medieval outlook of seeking and expecting perfection in the past, not in the future, but it doesn’t detract from the quality of this piece of writing. (Same for Tolkien, for example.) (And the poem actually talks about improving on the past, not venerating it; citing this part in isolation is a bit misleading.) (Now that I’m comparing these two quotes, the difference between “because the gods will see” and “because you’ll know it’s there” is... probably not worth overanalyzing, but at the same time intensely amusing.)
So it is not exactly like you've said:
> You can't design it first and then go and build it.
You can design, but you cannot build.
A process of building by a design can be paralleled with deploying software -- suddenly there is a hairy real world, not all the hair was considered at the design phase, and either we hack around existing software (i.e. design plans), or call a programmer to redesign.
Large software project, whether you're a developer of one or a team (and probably more commonly occurs in a team since it's large) will have warts. It's harder to manage complexity as the projects size increases since it accumulates and it accumulates fast.
You can't design it in full in one go, but you can design it and then incrementally update said design. Sadly many (companies) do not. But you can define the problem(s), the scope, the scale, and then design a solution appropriately to meet those needs (for a defined period of time). That's what distinguishes software engineering from hacking. They both have their place. Many companies claim to do the former but are mostly doing the latter. Software is still early in its life and as various kinds of system designs stabilize, so will the formalizations around what it means to be a software developer. Reading a book like Designing Data Intensive Application's you can't help but see those formalized topics budding.
It's not exactly a "one-man show," but I'm the chief architect, and the only one developing one of the three servers the app uses (I was also the original architect for another server, that is now being run by a different open-source team), I am also the only one developing the native iOS application. I may be writing some adjunct apps, once the main one has been released (like Watch, Mac and TV apps).
But we're a team. It's a 501(c)(3), with a mission to Serve a specific demographic. We have the advantage of being intimately familiar with the demographic. So far, we haven't had to shell out much. If they decide to write an Android version, then it may take some extra dosh. The good news is, the app is in "constant ship" state, so asking for funding is fairly straightforward. We just need to loop the person into the TestFlight group, and Bjørn Stronginthearm is your uncle.
When I do stuff for myself I apply the same principles I apply at work. It's insane how easy it is to change stuff later on. Didn't think about this use case before but now you do? Because I have properly maintainable code that is readable its very easy to change and changes are only needed in one place instead of all over the place. Knowledge of the right thing is kept in the right place instead of implicit knowledge all over the code etc.
It also helps to have 'one team be responsible for each service' instead of 'everyone can work on everything'. It's insane how fast you can move if you know the code well and it's maintainable.
I also pretty much never get questions about the code that I pass on to others.
I write about my process here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/leaving-a-legacy/
(Long screed. Few read it).
As a designer I’m a bit embarrassed by the trend to describe ourselves as product designers. To me a product designer makes chairs and coffee tables.
Apple also displays extremely high quality code, in the areas that are exposed to the public.
I have not seen too much Adobe code, but I’m told you can eat off the Photoshop codebase.
For myself, I need to keep my scope fairly humble, but I get great joy from it.
It sounds like a gratifying environment. Good show!
The only reason you can design a bridge beforehand is because (millions?) bridges have been built before so you can apply the lessons learned. Even if your bridge is "unusual", it will still be similar enough to older bridges so you don't have to invent the vast majority from scratch.
Other kinds of engineering don't have the luxory of leaning on the prior experience so much, simply because there is less of it. SpaceX's reusable rocket could not have been be fully designed before built, simply because nobody built a reusable rocket before. But it could be done through iteration, which is just another name for experimentation.
Software tends to be less like bridges and more like rockets... all of which falls within the spectrum of "engineering".