The Safety Hat Dance

There are studies that show that cyclists who wear helmets are more prone to accidents than those who do not. It is believed that the perception of protection offered by said headwear encourages the wearer to take more risks.

In the old mainframe days, owing to costs and limited machine resources, often there were only development and production environments. This meant that before you promoted a piece of code into prod you have better be very confident that it was kosha. Nowadays its not unusual to find 5 or so environments (Dev, System Test, Acceptance Test, Pre Prod, Performance Assurance, Prod, Continuation of Business, etc.).

On a recent project we raised over 200 severe software defects. That would be unthinkable in the old mainframe days. My point is that the more layers we add in an attempt to improve software quality and reliability has exactly the opposite effect and made us all just a bit less rigorous in our testing regimes. After all why do I need to test it when someone else will do it for me later on before it makes it into Prod.