How the Sausage is Made

I’ve seen several posts on LinkedIn stating, “Your customers don’t care about technical details. They don’t care if you practice test-driven development, use microservices, write code in C, Java, Python, or Go, follow Scrum, Kanban or whatever agile framework you follow.”

In the purest sense, this is true. Customers don’t want code; they want the outcomes this code enables. A software tool’s product info page won’t include a checkbox like “100% made with Domain-Driven Design” or “Now with 98% test coverage.”

But in a practical sense, customers do care.

• They want their software to be free of bugs.

• They want frequent releases of those features they asked for.

• If it’s a cloud-based service, they want it to be constantly available, with no noticeable slowdown or hiccups during peak traffic.

• They’ve gotten used to patterns and paradigms of behaviour, so your user interface needs to respect and follow that.

• They also want to know that their data is secure and won’t be on sale on the dark web the moment they hand it over to your site.

And because customers care about all these, they implicitly care about you doing your best to get there. We’ve got best practices for a reason, and just because a customer can’t literally tell whether your product was developed one way or another doesn’t mean they can suffer (or enjoy) the second-order effects.