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It's Martin Fowler. He makes money off trying to help people write better code. So you get the answer of "mostly yes." Ask management, or upper management,

It's Martin Fowler. He makes money off trying to help people write better code. So you get the answer of "mostly yes." Ask management, or upper management, or a customer, to write something as lengthy and comprehensive from their perspective, and I bet they could be pretty convincing that high quality is not always the best choice. I hear those arguments quite frequently.

tootie 7y ago
Quality is only ever a proxy for more practical metrics. If poor quality code causes more bugs, more failures, slower feature development then you've got something to measure ROI. And contrary to Mr Fowler's claims, there's plenty of times where code can afford bugs and failures pretty easily while dev time is generally very expensive. It depends heavily on what the software is used for and how often it's used. A million users transacting money? Quality first for sure. A content migration script run once a month where an intern can go fix all the mistakes by hand. Who cares if it sucks.
onion2k 7y ago
It's Martin Fowler. He makes money off trying to help people write better code. So you get the answer of "mostly yes." Isn't the true of every expert in every industry? They all make money telling people (what they believe is) the right way to do something, and it often sounds obvious once someone has actually articulated it, and even more often there's someone else whose job is to prioritize keeping costs down telling people that actually it's not true because they can save a few bucks in the short term by doing things the quick and dirty way. You choose who to believe.
- redleggedfrog 7y ago
  I define a difference between experts who make their money informing others how to write high quality software and experts who implement the (hopefully) high quality software. As the latter, there are most definitely cases where the high-quality argument is not valid. It's not a matter a belief. It's more about constraint. If you have the time and expertese, quality is great, and that's when I like software development the most. But I've also decided to eschew quantity to meet external demands. Then we're talking mitigation: "We'll farm out these 3 services to juniors/external devs to meet the client's/management's deadline with the expectation they'll be chucked and rewritten later." We're making the decision to take on technical debt and hopefully keep it isolated enough that it's relatively easy to redo. Martin Fowler and his ilk are frequently lacking a level of pragmatism that must be adopted to meet business needs.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  “They all make money telling people (what they believe is) the right way to do something, and it often sounds obvious once someone has actually articulated it,” Or it sounds obvious and clear until you actually try it and then things are not that clear anymore :)

tootie 7y ago

Quality is only ever a proxy for more practical metrics. If poor quality code causes more bugs, more failures, slower feature development then you've got something to measure ROI. And contrary to Mr Fowler's claims, there's plenty of times where code can afford bugs and failures pretty easily while dev time is generally very expensive. It depends heavily on what the software is used for and how often it's used. A million users transacting money? Quality first for sure. A content migration script run once a month where an intern can go fix all the mistakes by hand. Who cares if it sucks.

onion2k 7y ago

It's Martin Fowler. He makes money off trying to help people write better code. So you get the answer of "mostly yes." Isn't the true of every expert in every industry? They all make money telling people (what they believe is) the right way to do something, and it often sounds obvious once someone has actually articulated it, and even more often there's someone else whose job is to prioritize keeping costs down telling people that actually it's not true because they can save a few bucks in the short term by doing things the quick and dirty way. You choose who to believe.

redleggedfrog 7y ago
I define a difference between experts who make their money informing others how to write high quality software and experts who implement the (hopefully) high quality software. As the latter, there are most definitely cases where the high-quality argument is not valid. It's not a matter a belief. It's more about constraint. If you have the time and expertese, quality is great, and that's when I like software development the most. But I've also decided to eschew quantity to meet external demands. Then we're talking mitigation: "We'll farm out these 3 services to juniors/external devs to meet the client's/management's deadline with the expectation they'll be chucked and rewritten later." We're making the decision to take on technical debt and hopefully keep it isolated enough that it's relatively easy to redo. Martin Fowler and his ilk are frequently lacking a level of pragmatism that must be adopted to meet business needs.
maxxxxx 7y ago
“They all make money telling people (what they believe is) the right way to do something, and it often sounds obvious once someone has actually articulated it,” Or it sounds obvious and clear until you actually try it and then things are not that clear anymore :)