So there's a thread about how tech bloggers/speakers don't use citations compared to say law and academia. Several people seem offended that much of what's written is 'opinion' as if law was not exclusively about opinions. 1/
In the law there are thousands of years of history around the opinions and consequences of those opinions. There are entire structures around exploring those opinions and coming to consensus about various aspects of human behavior. 2/
Still, according to lawyers, when sued for malpractice, the law is not 'settled' in many areas. 3/
Similarly, we in the greater space of software development and computer operations have tons of opinions on the best way, right way, ethical way to go about our business and still don't benefit from having codified those things in a way we can reference and adjudicate. 4/
Should we consider running trials? Put up cases in an adversarial setting with a jury of skilled peers and start creating citable precedent? Could we have advocates for a practice or technique put forth their evidence and the court render an verdict? 5/
Imagine putting TDD on trial and then, if TDD is found to be the correct approach - insisting that professional software devs practice TDD. Adding mastery of TDD to the professional certification requirements to be admitted to the Professional Association of Software Creators 6/
Creating a code of software development statutes... How far would this extend into practices like Scrum or Kanban or code refactoring? Would choosing on-prem servers over serverless cloud services become an actionable offense? 7/
Could we run people out of the business for stacking in-memory databases on top of interfaces that eventually expose the data in an Oracle database - because performance. That might be worth the trouble. 8/
Would creating consensus and codifying practices help move the profession forward or simply discourage further innovation? Would corporate interests find a way to manipulate the system for their gain at our expense? 9/
Would love to see some discussion around this. Fin
