Hypothesis Driven Development for Software Engineers

Michael Gillett attended QCon London conference where he heard various talks ranging from microservice architectures to Chaos Engineering, focusing more on practices of creating software rather than showcasing frameworks and languages. A talk titled "Taking Back 'Software Engineering'" by Dave Farley stood out as it delved into the differences between being a Software Developer or an Engineer. Farley outlined three main phases of production we have gone through, emphasizing on Lean mass production and Just In Time (JIT) production which requires a good application of the Scientific Method to ensure high quality and efficient production lines. He argued that engineering and the application of the Scientific Method has led to some of humanity's greatest achievements, but there is a tendency in software development to shy away from the title of "Engineering". Farley suggested Hypothesis-Driven Development (HDD) as a way to truly move the industry to being one of engineers instead of developers. He also mentioned LaunchDarkly as an excellent tool for running experiments and testing hypotheses, allowing small changes to be made with minimal time and effort spent but useful results collected before major investment is made into developing a feature.