Insights from Huawei’s Letter on Elevating Software Engineering Capability and Building Trustworthy High‑Quality Products

Yesterday a public letter from Ren Zhengfei titled “Comprehensively Elevate Software‑Engineering Capability and Practice, Build Trustworthy High‑Quality Products” went viral; as a software‑engineering graduate I was intrigued and found the letter surprisingly deep, filled with professional terminology and apt analogies.

“Twenty years ago the IPD transformation reshaped our R&D model, moving from reliance on individuals and chance to a systematic, continuous delivery of high‑quality products.”

The letter highlights why Huawei’s software R&D has reached a leading level.

Huawei introduced IBM’s Integrated Product Development (IPD) in 1999; after twenty years IPD helped the company grow from a guerrilla force to a regular army, expanding the R&D staff from thousands to tens of thousands and covering mobile OS, applications, and cloud services.

IPD (Integrated Product Development) is a product‑development methodology; for software products the corresponding discipline is simply software engineering.

The background of the letter is the 2018 US‑China trade war, during which Huawei and ZTE became primary targets of US sanctions, and several countries began to boycott Huawei over alleged security risks. Consequently the letter mentions the keyword “trustworthy” seventeen times.

Only by convincing customers that Huawei’s products are trustworthy can the company overcome the crisis, so the letter asks: how to achieve trustworthiness?

Using a restaurant analogy, the author suggests that transparent, advanced management processes are the best way to restore confidence.

“We must change our mindset and pursue the creation of trustworthy high‑quality products, not only in terms of functionality and features but also in the quality of the development and delivery process.”

This signals a shift from focusing solely on result quality to also demanding process quality – a comprehensive upgrade of software‑engineering capability and practice.

Software Project Management Triple Constraint

“All managers and staff must not lower trustworthy requirements by citing schedule, features, or characteristics, ensuring that trustworthiness does not get distorted during execution.”

The classic project‑management triangle—time, scope, cost—directly determines product quality.

Hope leaders learn from Ren Zhengfei as much as they admire Steve Jobs.

Program Development

“We must start from the most basic coding quality, treating high‑quality code as a matter of dignity and personal reputation. Code is like a brick in a building; without high‑quality code, a trustworthy product is a castle in the air. We must follow coding standards, architecture principles, and use libraries and APIs to produce concise, readable, robust, and secure code.”

This paragraph sets basic expectations for programmers.

Architecture

“We must deeply understand the core elements of architecture and design with a trust‑oriented approach.”

The letter repeatedly stresses “trustworthy” and urges architects to avoid chasing every new trend, instead focusing on trustworthy‑oriented design.

“Under the premise of trustworthiness, we must balance performance, functionality, and scalability; define modules and interfaces with high cohesion and low coupling; follow principles of minimal privilege and attack surface; design isolation between modules; reuse mature components; and continuously optimize based on higher‑level architectural principles.”

These principles are sound but hard to achieve in practice.

Technical Debt

“We must refactor decayed architecture and historical code that does not meet software‑engineering standards and quality requirements. Even the best architecture has a limited lifespan; as time passes, environments change, and new features are added, architecture decays and must be refactored without hesitation, guided by trustworthy design principles.”

The author likens this to the Chinese saying about repairing old clothes, emphasizing that neglecting refactoring becomes a development obstacle.

Security

“The company has made network security and privacy protection the highest priority.”

“We must deeply study software technology, especially security technology.”

“We must follow principles of minimal privilege and attack surface, scientifically design module isolation and interfaces, and improve security.”

“Write concise, standard, readable, robust, and secure code.”

Building secure software requires security awareness, knowledge, and attention throughout architecture, coding, and testing.

Technology Is a Tool

The letter warns against treating any technology as superior; technology is merely a tool to build products, and the choice of technology must suit the project rather than follow hype.

Consistency

“We must adhere to process consistency, comply with applicable laws, industry standards, and ensure consistency from specifications to implementation, from code to binaries, and from architecture to design patterns, so that requirements match implementation and we keep promises to customers.”

Achieving consistency across all stages is essential for trustworthy high‑quality products.

Changing Habits

“We must change our behavior habits, pursue excellence, be open and transparent, actively expose problems, and drive improvement. Software development is creative work that requires intelligence and potential; we must stop valuing only functional results, enforce software‑engineering standards, avoid passive patch‑work, and shift from fragmented knowledge acquisition to systematic learning and knowledge‑base sharing.”

Only valuing functional results, ignoring code quality.

Not following software‑engineering standards.

Passive patch‑work without refactoring.

Fragmented knowledge acquisition without proactive learning.

Reluctance to share experience and code, missing the benefits of a shared knowledge base.

Software Engineering and Quality Engineering Rely on Architecture

“Software engineering and quality engineering must rely on architectural technology rather than CMM or QA processes; first consider whether technology can solve a problem, and if not, use management as a temporary measure while continuing to seek technical solutions.”

Over‑reliance on human management creates bottlenecks; leveraging architecture and tools (e.g., micro‑services, CI/CD, code review) reduces cost and improves quality.

“We will strengthen a Committer‑centric code review and submission mechanism; only rigorously reviewed code can be merged. We will build a higher‑level Committer team to guard architecture and code quality, promote those who write good architecture and code, and help those who do not meet standards.”

Software Engineering Is Like a Country’s Agriculture

“Software engineering is the fundamental infrastructure of a nation, like agriculture.”

The author hopes the letter will stimulate broader development of software‑engineering practices in China.

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