Ensuring quality for a peculiar piece of software
-
Locked
Joep Schuurkes and his team are building a very unusual kind of software. It is used only once a year by volunteers to tally votes in Dutch municipal elections. It runs air gapped in more than 300 locations, with no hot fixes, no monitoring, and no second chances.
In this talk, Joep shares how his team ensures quality under these extraordinary constraints. Instead of falling back on waterfall methods, they apply modern engineering principles like always be delivering and always be collecting feedback. You will see how they use practices such as working in thin vertical slices, maintaining a zero bug policy, writing use cases collaboratively, and working fully open source to build trust, transparency, and quality in a high-stakes environment.
Resources
- Writing Effective Use Cases - Alistair Cockburn, book
- Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game - Alistair Cockburn, book
- Elephant Carpaccio - Alistair Cockburn, workshop
- We Tried Baseball and It Didn't Work - Ron Jeffries, blog
- I Want You to Cheat: The Unreasonable Guide to Service and Quality - John Seddon, book
- Failure Demand - Vanguard, Blog
- Public GitHub repository – The Dutch Electoral Council’s election software project
Comments