How Terrible Code Gets Written By Perfectly Sane People

From Christian Maioli Mackeprang, the following:

Legacy code can be nasty, but I’ve been programming for 15 years and only a couple of times had I seen something like this. The authors had created their own framework, and it was a perfect storm of anti-patterns. …

And yet, it was not the code’s dismal quality that piqued my interest and led me to write this article. What I discovered after some months working there, was that the authors were actually an experienced group of senior developers with good technical skills. What could lead a team of competent developers to produce and actually deliver something like this?

I don’t necessarily buy all of these, but they’re worth thinking about:

• Giving excessive importance to estimates: “Your developers might choose to over-promise instead, and then skip important work such as thinking about architectural problems, or how to automate tasks, in order to meet an unrealistic deadline.”

• Giving no importance to project knowledge: “If you’re in a large project and there are modules for which you have no expert, no-one to ask about, that’s a big red flag.”

• Focusing on poor metrics such as “issues closed” or “commits per day”: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. (Goodhart’s law)”

• Assuming that good process fixes bad people: “[Fix your hiring.] Talent makes up for any other inefficiency in your team.”

• Ignoring proven practices such as code reviews and unit testing: “Refraining from using tools such as modern IDEs, version control and code inspection will set you back tremendously.”

• Hiring developers with no “people” skills: “It doesn’t matter that the other guy might be ten thousand miles away. One Skype call can turn a long coding marathon into a five-minute fix.”

Conclusion? “What you can’t assume is that just because you’ve signed up to apply Agile or some other tool, that nothing else matters and things will sort themselves out.”