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Software Industry Really Lacks Testing and Engineering Culture
The software industry loves to talk about quality, but when it comes to walking the talk, well, it’s a different story. Let me share a moment from my career that perfectly illustrates this.
A few years ago, I worked on a healthcare project where we were building a portal for patients to schedule appointments, access lab results, and consult doctors virtually.
Sounds straightforward, right? But then came the feature — a complex prescription renewal workflow. It allowed patients to request refills, notify doctors, and integrate with pharmacies for real-time updates.
The catch?
We got the feature handed to us a week before the planned release. There was zero documentation, no unit tests, and the codebase was a tangle of spaghetti logic.
Integration points with external pharmacy APIs were shaky at best, and every time we tried to test one flow, another would break. The deadline, however, was non-negotiable because marketing had already promised the feature to users.
We were in full-blown firefighting mode, patching bugs just to keep things from crashing. And while we managed to deploy something that worked — barely — the aftermath was painful. Pharmacies reported data mismatches, patients faced delays in approvals…
