Built to Last

Unit Test? Yes (also btw here’s a Diagnostic Tool that may help with moving from good to great)

Collins states going from good to great requires discipline (disciplined people, thought and action). Taking software quality from good to great likely requires some of the same (including relative to unit testing) while progressively building increased levels of fun. To some unit testing is common sense and their answer to “Is unit testing beneficial?” would likely be a form of yes, or that increasingly it should be (e.g., may help with ensuring value that is inherent, intrinsic and pervasive… for some projects or applications you may even say it would be critical and innately part of developing capability maturity and being socially responsible).

On a slightly different note here is a Diagnostic Tool that may help each of us along our respective journeys. Perhaps it can somehow be applied to help us along our collective one too as the IT profession moves from good to great and toward truly being built to last and increasingly more so for the benefit of all.

From Good to Great to Built to Last

A major launch related to the emerging global IT profession will happen in the coming year. Looking ahead more than a decade, 2020 could be a transition point, true leap year and time of more perfect vision that helps beam more value intrinsically and pervasively towards upcoming centuries.

At some juncture a future civilization (e.g., one that is perhaps even further enlightened) may look upon what we call the Dark Ages and say that 2020 was the start of the world coming out of the Gray Ages. 

Twain once conveyed the idea that a reader would have to discover their own order to a book. Perhaps this idea applies not only to readers.

From Good to Great to Built to Last. In an ironic twist, I now see Good to Great not as a sequel to Built to Last, but as more of a prequel. This book is about how to turn a good organization into one that produces sustained great results. Built to Last is about how you take a company with great results and turn it into an enduring great company of iconic stature. To make that final shift requires core values and a purpose beyond just making money combined with the key dynamic of preserve the core / stimulate progress. — Jim Collins, Good To Great

To ensure IT, and even humanity, is progressively built to last, perhaps the purpose of each person and organization must be beyond making money and inherently interconnected to a mindset for goodness that preserves and enhances core principles while increasingly inspiring trust, empowerment, collaboration, alignment and progressive excellence.