Great perspective. When we are developing code, it is easy to think that "my code", which "I implemented" and "I reviewed", is intuitive and correct. But when we share our code with a colleague for review, that code is seen by a different pair of eyes: it is received more critically, perceived as less trustworthy, and very often not understood at the same level of detail by the reviewer as by its author.
Scale that to a project with several developers and several teams, and the result is that, for the engineering manager responsible for the project, correctness and conformity to requirements need to be managed and achieved without the manager having to review and understand every line of code. That would be impractical. The manager will need to use other strategies and tools to achieve this, including but not limited to:
- Mature product development and quality assurance processes;
- Sound architecture and system design;
- Adherence to software development principles and best practices;
- Comprehensive automated testing to validate expected behavior, prevent regressions, and ensure system reliability.
So now developers are moving a bit higher up the tactical/strategic scale and facing challenges that used to be handled only by technical engineering managers. We've become coding agent managers now.
Scale that to a project with several developers and several teams, and the result is that, for the engineering manager responsible for the project, correctness and conformity to requirements need to be managed and achieved without the manager having to review and understand every line of code. That would be impractical. The manager will need to use other strategies and tools to achieve this, including but not limited to:
- Mature product development and quality assurance processes;
- Sound architecture and system design;
- Adherence to software development principles and best practices;
- Comprehensive automated testing to validate expected behavior, prevent regressions, and ensure system reliability.
So now developers are moving a bit higher up the tactical/strategic scale and facing challenges that used to be handled only by technical engineering managers. We've become coding agent managers now.