I finished the podcast a couple hours ago. It was pretty clear to me that Hipp has the perspective of a person working on small teams, where most of the changes to the system either don't affect you or are highly visible.
This is not a man who fears the existential dread of discovering, just after you've stated loudly that some part of the system could not possibly break that way, that some other developer has pulled the rug out from under you when you weren't looking.
The odds that I add the string "52" to a column I know damn well has integers is pretty low, but non-zero. And I'm gonna transpose some fields eventually. The odds of any particular coworker doing the same is some multiple of that. But q^n across my entire team, across months and years, across new hires and people switching into and out of the team? We are so deep into Murphy's Law territory that it's almost a certainty.
It's a fool's errand to try to prevent absolutely every one of those scenarios happening. All I ask is that we have a way to discover them early and cheaply.
This is not a man who fears the existential dread of discovering, just after you've stated loudly that some part of the system could not possibly break that way, that some other developer has pulled the rug out from under you when you weren't looking.
The odds that I add the string "52" to a column I know damn well has integers is pretty low, but non-zero. And I'm gonna transpose some fields eventually. The odds of any particular coworker doing the same is some multiple of that. But q^n across my entire team, across months and years, across new hires and people switching into and out of the team? We are so deep into Murphy's Law territory that it's almost a certainty.
It's a fool's errand to try to prevent absolutely every one of those scenarios happening. All I ask is that we have a way to discover them early and cheaply.