“that works” is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I take it to mean some point in the quality space where the number of bugs (noisy crashes or silent inaccuraci

“that works” is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I take it to mean some point in the quality space where the number of bugs (noisy crashes or silent inaccuracies) is almost zero. “that works” can also mean demo to pointy haired boss and it works one time on a developers laptop. But that really means “that seems to work”. There are different concerns at play: Are you writing redundant tests? Could tests be made redundant by say making better tests, sophisticated type systems or better architecture. “Make illegal state impossible” kind of things. For example in C# the private keyword is an assurance of a constraint. Your compiler will check the illegal state cannot be made by an external class corrupting it, reducing the scope of code that needs to be checked. Modularizing code well can also help. Making it easier for developers to understand how things fit together, further improving quality. “10000 tests + shit architecture < 1000 tests and good architecture” will often be true for the real definition of “that works”.