Here's how you can prioritize speed and quality as a software engineer working towards deadlines.

The challenge I have noticed is with changing priorities minimal is all you get. This can leave you with a lack luster product as it never receives the iteration it needs. You have to carve out that time to go back to your customers and deliver the features that will delight them.

Tambien es bueno tener en cuenta la ley de Pareto, que dice que hay que encontrar el 20% del sistema que cubre el 80% de las necesidades del usuario. de ese modo en cada Sprint nos enfocamos en hacer ese 20% para darle al usuario final lo que mas le sirve primero.

Quality comprises testing, decisions and processes. To deliver quality, concentrate on the problem being solved and how it is getting solved. Get the problems addressed through a bunch of small user stories, plan upfront for these on how and what to test. Avoid dependencies on external factors and take note of risk involved in implementation (if any). Deliver a workable solution that may not be perfect solution, it may have minor bugs or have some workarounds to navigate through errors, but does work.

MVPing too often invites for workarounds. The product can end up in a corner where it is a lot if efforts to drive further evolution. Besides this pitfall, MVPing is of course extremely important.

It is essential that MVP be measured not just in the smallest segment of code change but in terms of value increments. A segment of code that provides no value does not move the needle towards realizing the final objective; in order to build end-user trust and ownership, center your processes around what they care about: realized improvements to the end system.

Creating tests before and as you are implementing the code/project really helps to keep the code “cleaner” and easier to maintain - fewer “oops I didn’t think of that” moments and much easier to refactor or even scrap and start again between iterations. There’s less to scrap since each small iteration is built upon a bedrock of past iterations and tests, so there’s less “motivation” to layer on patch upon patch of “fixes” when it should have been scraped and started over.

The agile approaches foster iterative development that allow early feedback from the users and a better time-to-market. This means that at each iteration there is always a risk of breaking what was released months ago. To mitigate such risk, as a developer, you want some sort of insurance policy. This insurance is bought by investing your time to write tests. You can buy low-cost insurance policies like the unit tests, which are fast and require few resources, or you can buy expensive insurance policies like end-to-end tests, which are slow, require a lot of maintenance and are hungry of resources. And, if the risk is high, you might want to buy both...

The best way to ensure code quality is to write tests - Unit testing helps catch scenarios and the fact that we run unit tests each time we compile ensures that different developers working on the same project do not really mess up the logic.

My key learnings on Code Quality: Code Reviews: Regular peer reviews of code help identify potential issues early, improve code quality, and share knowledge among team members. Leverage this to drive learning as much as to ensure quality. Automated tests: including unit, integration, and system tests, ensure that software works as expected and reduce the time required for manual testing. Automation should be at the heart of everything you do. Version Control Systems: You cannot have a quality software development process without it. Refactoring: Regularly improving existing code without changing its functionality helps maintain code quality and adaptability. Maintainability.

Code reviews and pair programming is increasingly important as AI-generated code becomes more prevalent. This code highlights the practices of "5 minutes to code, 5 days to implement". Toolsets must be used correctly and in line with standards set for system consistency and scalability.

Quality automation requires the same attention as development code. It involves designing robust, maintainable frameworks that adapt to changes and scale with the project. Many teams struggle because testing teams often lack the time and resources needed for quality automation, with a focus on immediate deliverables. Automation should be a collaborative effort among developers, testers, and product owners, aligning with project objectives.

Less risk: automated tests reduce the chance of introducing bugs, creating a safety net that increases the developer’s confidence in their code. More frequent releases: the automation provided by continuous delivery and continuous deployment allows developers to release and deploy software safely many times per day. Improved productivity: freed from the manual labor of building and testing the code, developers can focus on the creative aspects of coding. Elevated quality: CI acts as a quality gate, preventing code that is not up to standards from getting released. Better design: the iterative nature of continuous integration lets developers work in small increments, allowing a higher degree of experimentation, which leads to more ideas

The use of Git for CI/CD, ensures efficiency when running tests and lint checkers, as well as ensuring a successful build. Not only does automating these processes allow for improved efficiency, but there is an added assurance of high quality contributions to your software.

Automated tests, including unit, integration, and system tests, ensure that software works as expected and reduce the time required for manual testing. Automation should be at the heart of everything you do. Any process that can be automated should be automated.

A more nuanced take would be to first take a step back, and think. Clarify, distill and then focus on the most important 80% of what is truly needed to deliver the solution. It's very simple. That part will likely take a fraction of the time versus perfection. And, pragmatically, in most tasks and roles outside of critical systems - that will almost always be enough to get it over the line. And It's not exactly best practice, and it's a dirty controversial 'truth' - but remember, these days customers are often beta testers especially in the SV paradigm. I know that feels icky when we want to deliver quality but it's so often the way of the world.

At SS&C Intralinks, I learned how crucial time management by breaking down projects into smaller, manageable tasks and prioritizing them, I could meet deadlines without compromising on quality. Using techniques like timeboxing helped me stay focused and avoid getting caught up in perfectionism. This experience taught me that working smarter, not harder, is the real key to success in Software Engineering.

In two areas you must not deliver half-finished work before go-live: - Security: There is no bad press than data breach. You lose the credibility of your clients and users. It hinders to attract more users in future. - User Experience: if user isn't happy using your product they will find alternatives. Such as slowness of your product, frequent errors without friendly explanation, too many steps to complete a tasks, etc. I prefer to deliver fewer high quality features than many features with bad user experience.

Minimal viable product, Agile methods, risk — they all say the same thing. Understand the requirements, what is needed now versus the theoretical future, and prioritize. In the end it’s about setting an expectation and driving towards it. Rather than accept that all variables are static - which leads to failure in the majority of cases; communication and clearly define expectations, prioritize, estimate, and focus on doing the right thing. In some circumstances, this means you need to ensure you present yourself as the expert and converse clearly, concisely, and without fear.

Consider the team culture! As much as process and tools can help us achieve greatness, we need to focus on the dynamic in any delivery team. We should strive to create psychologically safe and respectful environments that ensure conditions are right for innovation and sharing and support.

A few things that I have observed in my experience - 1. Code reuse. This saves time and is a good design practice. Create reusable methods and APIs etc so others can reuse your code instead of reinventing the wheel. This might take time upfront but the rewards will outweigh the initial lift. 2. Test early. This is part of the Agile process but I want to emphasize that Unit Testing your code (tools like GitHub CoPilot can speed this up), testing at the API level and ensuring every story is testable - these are important to catch bugs early on and to create a quality product. This might sound time consuming, but it will save you from going back to the drawing board and reworking your design or re-writing your code.

Some aspects to focus on Begin coding after you understand the need from the user’s perspective Ensure requirement and design issues are caught up front to reduce risk of effort and cost overruns. Use TDD to cover the key aspects of the requirement Do not gold plate. However keep code extensible for future needs. Have code peer reviewed before deployment. Ensure thorough automated testing to reduce bugs and rework effort. Shift left to ensure non-functional requirements are met. Follow KISS to ensure future LoE is manageable Document tradeoff decisions and tech debt so that it can be addressed effectively