The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

by Gene Kim

Punishing failure and “shooting the messenger” only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.

Do we blindly work on small pieces of the whole, only seeing the outcomes of our work during a deployment when everything blows up,

test plan for input validation, to ensure that every field in each form rejects any non-conforming input.

Great QA requires a perverse and sometimes sadistic intuition for what will cause software to blow up, crash, or endlessly hang.

tests to check whether the feature actually worked as designed.

Accurately diagnosing the problem is important, because they can help the customer avoid going to a service station. There are many examples of service stations taking advantage of their customers, charging for work they don’t need.

This is not a story about small beating large; it’s fast beats slow. What the past couple of months have decisively proven to her is that greatness can be stifled, but it can also be restored.

It’s to ensure that the entire company can ship the best ideas, wherever they come from, quickly, safely, and securely.