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Great advice! I would agree with everything except maybe that “I just had to hack something together…” always is a bad thing. Especially from the business poin

Great advice! I would agree with everything except maybe that “I just had to hack something together…” always is a bad thing. Especially from the business point of view this article stresses, it can be reasonable to 80/20 your way out of certain problems and then polish it in the future.

UK-AL 12y ago
I also think it presents a highly optimistic view of the average manager.
- icehawk219 12y ago
  As well as your average customer. Your average customer couldn't care less about the maintainability, testability, or cleanliness of the code. They care about getting the features they asked for within the time frame they were promised for the price they were quoted. You could argue that those things all play into that and are things they should care about and I wouldn't disagree. But the reality is they don't. If you tell them you have to push it back because you need to clean up the code and make it look pretty you're going to have an unhappy customer.
onion2k 12y ago
The problem with the "Don't hack things together" advice is that it's invariably written by developers who like to write code, enjoy writing about code, and want to be seen as thoughtful and influential people in their development community. Those sorts of people tend to gravitate towards the projects that have the scale where code quality is critical because what they work on lasts for years with thousands of people building on it. If you're a developer who throws code together in a few months for clients who aren't paying for a quality product, and maybe you'll come back to it a couple of times in the future when it needs a new field added or a page title changed, then a hack is perfectly valid and can hugely improve your business's bottom line over spending even just another 10% making sure you've got tests and documentation and defensive code and so on. Spending time on the maintainability of code that no one will ever maintain is a waste of time.
kylnew 12y ago
Thanks for this comment. I kind of feared saying something like this would be begging for down votes, but I'm glad I'm not alone. I truly believe that a good developer knows how to strike a balance, and if he/she wants to be a hero to the team, sometimes a hack is better than stressing out 4 other people because you are insistent about adhering to an architectural pattern in the face of a looming and important deadline. This has been a major point of contention for us recently with team members that can't distinguish 'urgent' matters from 'important' ones.

UK-AL 12y ago

I also think it presents a highly optimistic view of the average manager.

icehawk219 12y ago
As well as your average customer. Your average customer couldn't care less about the maintainability, testability, or cleanliness of the code. They care about getting the features they asked for within the time frame they were promised for the price they were quoted. You could argue that those things all play into that and are things they should care about and I wouldn't disagree. But the reality is they don't. If you tell them you have to push it back because you need to clean up the code and make it look pretty you're going to have an unhappy customer.

onion2k 12y ago

The problem with the "Don't hack things together" advice is that it's invariably written by developers who like to write code, enjoy writing about code, and want to be seen as thoughtful and influential people in their development community. Those sorts of people tend to gravitate towards the projects that have the scale where code quality is critical because what they work on lasts for years with thousands of people building on it. If you're a developer who throws code together in a few months for clients who aren't paying for a quality product, and maybe you'll come back to it a couple of times in the future when it needs a new field added or a page title changed, then a hack is perfectly valid and can hugely improve your business's bottom line over spending even just another 10% making sure you've got tests and documentation and defensive code and so on. Spending time on the maintainability of code that no one will ever maintain is a waste of time.

kylnew 12y ago

Thanks for this comment. I kind of feared saying something like this would be begging for down votes, but I'm glad I'm not alone. I truly believe that a good developer knows how to strike a balance, and if he/she wants to be a hero to the team, sometimes a hack is better than stressing out 4 other people because you are insistent about adhering to an architectural pattern in the face of a looming and important deadline. This has been a major point of contention for us recently with team members that can't distinguish 'urgent' matters from 'important' ones.