Writing code is a straightforward task. What takes days or weeks is scanning and deciphering someone else's buggy digital hairball (and those programmers also

Writing code is a straightforward task. What takes days or weeks is scanning and deciphering someone else's buggy digital hairball (and those programmers also thought they were "getting things done" when they "finished" their unmaintainable messes). I'm not a huge fan of IDEs or complex processes, but many tools do help. A debugger, static analyzer, and heck even 'grep', go a long way; really, anything that looks at the code is going to do some good. On the other hand, I find it useless to have processes that distort reality (e.g. pretty UML documents about what the code might do, if only someone had written the code that way).