The do no harm rule of software engineering

It is practically impossible to write software without bugs but it is even harder to foresee the side effects to make sure everything is in order. No software professional wants to take this hippocratic oath to write code without bugs but the rate of bugs you create as you mature in the profession should asymptote to 0.

I really love this idea from uncle Bob “human body is also a complicated system but doctors take an oath to do no harm still diagnosing your disease and doing the treatment”. If doctors can do it why can’t software professionals? The idea is not to be an extremist and try to write code without any bugs but as professional software developers, we can do a lot to prevent it.

TDD, BDD all of this fancy stuff of software engineering can help you follow the do no harm rule.

The idea and reference of the above content are taken from Uncle Bob’s Clean Coder book.

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