What Huawei’s 20‑Year IPD Journey Reveals About Building Trustworthy Software

The author, a software‑engineering graduate, was drawn to Ren Zhengfei’s open letter “Comprehensively Improve Software Engineering Capability and Practice, Build Trustworthy High‑Quality Products,” which offers deep, jargon‑rich insights into software engineering.

Huawei began importing IBM’s Integrated Product Development (IPD) methodology in 1999; twenty years later the framework has transformed the company from a guerrilla‑style operation into a formalized R&D powerhouse of tens of thousands, covering mobile operating systems, applications, and cloud services.

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

Amid the 2018 US‑China trade war and accusations of espionage, Huawei stresses the need for “trustworthiness” – a theme repeated 17 times in the letter – as the key to overcoming the crisis.

“We must shift our mindset to pursue trustworthy high‑quality products, not only in functionality but also in the development and delivery process.”

Software Project Management Gold Triangle

“All managers and staff must not lower trust requirements for the sake of schedule, features, or scope; the trust criteria must remain unchanged during execution.”

The classic project‑management triangle of time, scope, and cost directly determines product quality, and sacrificing any element inevitably harms trust.

Programming

“We must start from the most basic coding quality, treating high‑quality code as a matter of personal reputation. Code is the bricks of a building; without quality code, a trustworthy product is an empty tower.”

Developers are urged to follow coding standards, design principles, and to write clean, readable, robust, and secure code.

Architecture

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

Architecture should balance performance, functionality, and extensibility while adhering to principles such as high cohesion, low coupling, minimal attack surface, and reuse of mature components.

Technical Debt

“We must refactor decayed architecture and legacy code that does not meet software‑engineering standards and quality requirements.”

As Huawei’s rapid growth introduced shortcuts, the company now faces a transition from speed‑first to quality‑first, requiring systematic refactoring.

Security

“Network security and privacy protection are the highest company priorities.”

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

“We must follow principles of minimal privilege and attack surface, designing module isolation and interfaces to enhance security.”

Building secure software demands awareness, proper design, and rigorous implementation throughout the development lifecycle.

Technology as a Tool

Technology choices should serve product goals; advanced or trendy tools are only valuable when they fit the current context.

Consistency

“We must enforce process consistency, aligning laws, industry standards, design patterns, coding norms, and binary outputs to ensure that requirements match implementation.”

Achieving consistency across requirements, design, code, and deployment is essential for delivering trustworthy products.

Changing Habits

“We need to change behavior, pursue excellence, be transparent, and proactively improve. Software development is creative work that requires both deep expertise and broad knowledge.”

Stop valuing only functional results and neglecting code quality.

Strictly follow software‑engineering standards.

Avoid passive patch‑work; embrace refactoring.

Move from fragmented learning to systematic, proactive skill development.

Share experience and code to build a shared knowledge base.

Software Engineering as National Agriculture

“Software engineering is the foundational infrastructure, like agriculture for a nation.”

The article calls for greater attention to fundamental software‑engineering principles rather than chasing flashy technologies.

Overall, the letter advocates that high‑quality software and trustworthy products arise from disciplined engineering practices, robust architecture, continuous learning, and cultural change.