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Regarding b): Bad code quality tends to lead to bad feature velocity fast, and it gets worse over time. Maintainability and extensibility is a major factor to c

• runawaybottle 6y ago
  Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Bad code has a real world business cost, and velocity is it. Suddenly you will see you can’t just scale the team up because it takes new team members a long time to grok the codebase and work within it. Similarly, a disconnect happens between business and engineering where building features that appear similar to already existing features still take longer to build since the existing implementations were never built to be extendable or reusable. While all this is happening, the team is busy working around the codebase, not with it, to the point where they can’t apply solid refinement to the end product. Adequate time for bug fixing/testing is not allotted since the team is fighting the codebase to just get features out. Your product ends up lacking quality. Developer quality of life goes down, which believe it or not, impacts velocity. Suddenly it’s not pleasant for the team to casually peruse the codebase. Suddenly those time estimates are all in the mid-high range, they can’t get a breather from the cognitive overload. Finally, those little tweaks business wants to make become the stuff of nightmare. Stand-up becomes a call for mercy, ‘Making that change is not straightforward’, a constant compromise, ‘Can we just settle for this alternative instead?’. A shitty codebase has an outsized cost for sure.