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I'm finally working directly with one of these developers. Thankfully he is leaving next week on his own volition. My work load has doubled over the past severa

I'm finally working directly with one of these developers. Thankfully he is leaving next week on his own volition. My work load has doubled over the past several weeks due to rewriting most of his code. And needing to extensively vet code that he's still submitting. The worst part is that he's reasonably productive at producing lines and lines of code that barely function.

manishsharan 4y ago
I am curious. Does your organization not use TDD ? How would the code be allowed to marge without running your test suite ? In my experience, I have found it is more productive to coach and mentor developers to adapt TDD and DevOps practices than to vet their code. Instead of vetting their code, I would incorporate statistical code analysis and vulnerability analysis into the build system.
- lawn 4y ago
  If you churn out new code and features, your test suite will be of very little help if any. If you're also the one responsible for writing tests, you can easily churn out even more unmaintainable crap. In my experience it's not enough to just have them do TDD, because writing a good test suite is hard.
  - turtleyacht 4y ago
    Mutation testing can help evaluate the quality of a test suite. The application code is automatically tweaked and tests run. If a mutant is not "killed," then additional tests may be needed.
- morelisp 4y ago
  > coach and mentor developers [rather than] vet their code. How do you teach these things concretely without discussing specific code? How do you tell if the lessons are sticking without checking their future work? Aside from that, neither TDD nor DevOps practices will get you idiomatic (relative to internally and externally) code, documentation, non-requirement performance worth a damn, test suites that are any good to begin with, etc. etc.. If you're running through a backlog of CRUD-ish features or whatever maybe those don't matter, though then I also wonder why the need for TDD instead of just a good CI pipeline.
- yonaguska 4y ago
  Not enough. I'm trying to do this with our new code base, but it's difficult when I need to get everyone else on board. I'm trying to lead by example, but I feel like I'm also racing against other devs to get good feature work in before bad code gets in. The rest of the devs will simply copy what the existing code does instead of figuring how how to do something properly. Doubly frustrating that I don't have a senior title or pay, but am hiring and cleaning up after senior devs.

manishsharan 4y ago

I am curious. Does your organization not use TDD ? How would the code be allowed to marge without running your test suite ? In my experience, I have found it is more productive to coach and mentor developers to adapt TDD and DevOps practices than to vet their code. Instead of vetting their code, I would incorporate statistical code analysis and vulnerability analysis into the build system.

lawn 4y ago
If you churn out new code and features, your test suite will be of very little help if any. If you're also the one responsible for writing tests, you can easily churn out even more unmaintainable crap. In my experience it's not enough to just have them do TDD, because writing a good test suite is hard.
- turtleyacht 4y ago
  Mutation testing can help evaluate the quality of a test suite. The application code is automatically tweaked and tests run. If a mutant is not "killed," then additional tests may be needed.
morelisp 4y ago
> coach and mentor developers [rather than] vet their code. How do you teach these things concretely without discussing specific code? How do you tell if the lessons are sticking without checking their future work? Aside from that, neither TDD nor DevOps practices will get you idiomatic (relative to internally and externally) code, documentation, non-requirement performance worth a damn, test suites that are any good to begin with, etc. etc.. If you're running through a backlog of CRUD-ish features or whatever maybe those don't matter, though then I also wonder why the need for TDD instead of just a good CI pipeline.
yonaguska 4y ago
Not enough. I'm trying to do this with our new code base, but it's difficult when I need to get everyone else on board. I'm trying to lead by example, but I feel like I'm also racing against other devs to get good feature work in before bad code gets in. The rest of the devs will simply copy what the existing code does instead of figuring how how to do something properly. Doubly frustrating that I don't have a senior title or pay, but am hiring and cleaning up after senior devs.