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No Benefit or Incentive for Developers to Create Quality Code on Projects
- MattGaiser 5y ago> The customer and non-technical people won’t understand or value the quality steps in development, but you have to insist on it. Given the transient nature of developers (mentioned in the article as a reason for them not caring about code quality), are they going to be any more willing to engage in regular arguments?
- gregjor 5y agoThe article does not define quality. That’s actually part of the problem: programmers don’t have a shared definition of quality, or a process to achieve it. Businesses paying for software generally have other priorities, like making money, reducing costs and risks, attracting and retaining customers, competitive advantage. The nebulous concept of code quality may not have more value than other business requirements. Perfect code that’s a year late has little value if the business loses millions of dollars because of delays. This kind of blaming and navel-gazing underlines the problem of programmers viewing perfect code as their main value-add, rather than looking at all of the priorities and competing requirements any business faces and working to add value to the business, not just to their CV.