Step 5 touches on what I like to call "engineering judgment".
One of the things that distinguishes great engineers is that they make good judgment calls about how to apply technology or which direction to proceed. They understand pragmatism and balance. They understand not to get infatuated with new technologies but not to close their minds to them either. They understand not to dogmatically apply rules and best practices but not to undervalue them either. They understand the context of their decisions, for example sometimes code quality is more important and other times getting it built and shipped is more important.
As in life, good and bad decisions can be the key determiner of where you end up. You can employ a department full of skilled coders and make a few wrong decisions and your project could still end up a failure.
Some people never develop good engineering judgment. They always see questions as black and white, or they can't let go of chasing silver bullet solutions, etc.
Anyway, it's one thing to understand how to do unit tests. It's another thing to understand why you'd use them, what you can and can't get out of them, what the costs are, and take into account all that to make good decisions about how/where to use them.
One of the things that distinguishes great engineers is that they make good judgment calls about how to apply technology or which direction to proceed. They understand pragmatism and balance. They understand not to get infatuated with new technologies but not to close their minds to them either. They understand not to dogmatically apply rules and best practices but not to undervalue them either. They understand the context of their decisions, for example sometimes code quality is more important and other times getting it built and shipped is more important.
As in life, good and bad decisions can be the key determiner of where you end up. You can employ a department full of skilled coders and make a few wrong decisions and your project could still end up a failure.
Some people never develop good engineering judgment. They always see questions as black and white, or they can't let go of chasing silver bullet solutions, etc.
Anyway, it's one thing to understand how to do unit tests. It's another thing to understand why you'd use them, what you can and can't get out of them, what the costs are, and take into account all that to make good decisions about how/where to use them.