Thread by @swardley

The digital transformation market is estimated by some analysts to be worth $3 trillion by 2025 . At the same time, 84% of these efforts are likely to fail based on historic rates.

That's just total nonsense, not the size of the market but the failure ...

... I know Kotter's HBR review of corporate transformation efforts in 2000 was “huge sums spent and huge rates of failure” but that was 20 years ago. Today transformation is easy ...

... Take a map of any system. It's an imperfect map, you'll have submaps for each of the component and maybe submaps below that. But the lines are interfaces and long ago we all learnt how to do test driven development ...

... so whenever you build some new component or new interface, you start by first building the test. The test describes the function of it. The test will first fail because we haven't built the thing yet, so you now build the thing ...

... every feature, every addition, every business process, every ideas starts with a test. It could be paper, it could be code, it could be your own car in factory mode testing itself ...

... I could want to get rich. Test 1 - Do I have a bank account? FAIL ... better fix that ...

... Test 1 - Do I have a bank account? TRUE ... Test 2 - Is the amount of money increasing? FAIL ... better fix that ...

... then as the thing evolves the set of test expands. A few hundred for something then iteratively becomes tens of thousands for a product and hundreds thousands for a commodity ...

... our growing empire is now hundreds of millions of tests, but the tests all run and help us modify and change our environment. Long gone are the days where we worry about the dangers that change causes ...

... we even have masters of disasters deliberately paid to cause chaos to help improve our tests, Netflix even automated this long ago in the chaos monkey ...

... we are comfortable, we can change, transformation is easy and those bad old days where testing was an add-on, an after thought are long gone. The "let's cut testing to ship" are curses never uttered ...

... tests are not what you end with but what you start with ...

... which is why we don't suffer these catastrophic failures of transformation anymore, we do not need to worry about what is connected to what because we have all long understood that ....

... the true intellectual capital of any organisation, it's processes, its experience, its interconnections, it's lifeblood are written in those hundreds of millions of tests.

The very idea that some "modern" organisation would discard it core essence, its core knowledge, would fail to build that those test, would suffer constant worry over change and would suffer catatstrophic failures in transformation because ...

....some short sighted decisions to cut costs is laughable. Everyone uses test driven development, no-one is so foolish not to ...

... it's why car manufacturers can changes their motor vehicles in the production line every few hours because the cars test themselves. It's how we design space rockets ...

... the testing suite represents the true knowledge capital of any organisation. It's farcical to imply that we would build things without it, without test driven development ...

... it would be like trying to build an AI with a f*cking abacus.

X : You made some typos.
Me : Hmmm. Good. I've sat there listening to organisation complain about how hard change is and yet ... they have no test driven development, no effective tests. I don't care about a few bits of grammar. These business are mad, the executive are clueless.

I cannot possibly comprehend how anyone, anywhere in business, in finance, in engineering, in software does not use a test driven development model in 2022.

My mind is blown.

X : What if we have a specification.
Me : The tests are the specification.

As much as my mind is blown reality comes and regularly comforts me by pointing out that the gap between these companies on the edge and those lagging is at least 20 to 25 years.

So, all is good. They will soon start to learn.

X : Bit of a rant?
Me : I suppose. It's been one of those days listening to people talk about how the isolation economy caused by covid has accelerated these companies and then being brought down to earth by discovering they are still 20 to 25 years behind where they need to be.

X : Cloud?
Me : Baton? Is this wordle?
X : Testing changed with cloud.
Me : The practices expanded with cloud ... continuous deployment, chaos engines etc. They are are underpinned by test driven development.
X : You don't need TDD with the cloud.
Me : Please change industry.

X : Do you still think the "84% of these efforts are likely to fail" is nonsense?
Me : Given the apparent willingness to run organisations without test driven development, I now think 84% is conservative.

X : Writing tests before the actual code is ridiculous in all circumstances other than the most trivial.
Me : At some point after 1999, I must have fallen through a blackhole into a parallel universe.

X : I don't see the point.
Me : Take trasitioning to cloud. Everytime I see a company with maps and test driven development, I think "it won't be easy but it's a good place to re-architect".

No maps, no TDD? I want to hide in a corner and weep over the carnage that will follow.

Building and the evolution of any system is akin to writing the contract for the system.

We start with little understanding of what it is we are trying to do and overtime our knowledge expands.

Every test you writes expands the visible portion of that hidden contract.

Tests are that system made visible.

I use the old mantra of say what you're going to do, do it and say you've done it i.e. write the test, build the code, test it.

Without tests, you have no real visibility on the system. You have hopes and that's all.

X : What if we don't have TDD?
Me : If you've an estate without TDD then use some iterative mechanism of challenge such as spend control to introduce TDD and mapping (also) to every new project / change. Build up that understanding of your landscape and the contracts you have ...

... once you have enough test coverage then identification, transition and removal of tech debt becomes easier.
X : A lot of work?
Me : Work that should have been done and now you're suffering from the lack of. Without a time machine, you'll have to iterate out of this mess.