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I have an exercise for you. Imagine instead of whatever software you are building, you are building a physical robot to perform the same task.
If you’re making a survey website, instead imagine you are building a robot that asks passersby to take surveys. How would this change your approach?
How rigorous would your documentation be? Would you plan the various modules and document their inter-connectedness for other teams to take advantage of when making changes?
Would you design your circuit boards with expansion in mind? Perhaps you’d explore using generic, off-the-shelf parts to keep costs and development time down. Do you need to be concerned about the availability of any of your generic parts? Are the suppliers reliable and do they provide good support for any potentially robot-breaking issues?
Would you explore any invented, individual components as potential secondary products? Perhaps the widget you just created could be easily generalised and published as open-source hardware to improve your company’s profile and the ecosystem surrounding your robot.
Would you test the robot in isolation to ensure it couldn’t hurt any potential users? Would you test it with real people to observe their interactions when the robot spoke to them? Does your robot have any sharp edges that could be filed down in a 5 minute quick-win?
Could any of these questions apply to your software project? I realise, of course, that software and robots have very different design concerns. Software is more easily iterated upon and hardware is costly to change but that cost enforces a level of rigour often missing from software design and perhaps there’s something to be made of that.
In the end, be glad that you don’t have to deal with hardware.
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Steven Poulton is a web developer and technical architect living in Manchester, England. In his spare time he likes to make indie music, make indie games and play with his indie cats.
The Robot Test For Software Engineers was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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