Why Good Developers Write Bad Code: An Observational Case Study [pdf]

TL;DR key recommendations:<p>- Once a project is completed, the team must ensure that the “What” and “Why” of each software item are properly documented.<p>- In the cases of parallel development of inter-dependent software modules set up a negotiation table to solve conflict between the development teams.<p>- Make sure that the development team is aware of the CMMI-ACQ or ISO12207 processes for negotiating with third parties.<p>- Make sure that testers are involved when negotiating with a third party for a potentially vulnerable software component. <p>- Plan organization-wide process reviews to detect isolated processes and to promote information flows between processes.<p>- Planned special budget items to support long lasting corrections or corrections that are likely to benefit many modules. <p>- Projects with strict deadlines are risky, and should be carefully monitored to avoid last minute unplanned activities.<p>- Team members should maintain a careful balance between the flows of information within formal development processes and informal human interactions.<p>- Team members should make sure that knowledge is appropriately distributed amongst them. For example, pair programming is a practice which can promote knowledge sharing.<p>- Any intrusion into the team dynamics by outsiders should be done very carefully.

&quot;The project was a second attempt to overhaul this complex Module. A first attempt was made between 2010 and 2012 but was abandoned after the fully integrated software did not work. Because this project was a second attempt, many specifications and design documents could be reused. Accordingly, the development has essentially followed a waterfall process, as few problems were expected the second time around.&quot;<p>I love the sheer insanity of this.<p>1. Write up a plan.<p>2. Execute the plan.<p>3. Total project failure. Abandon it.<p>4. Decide to try again.<p>5. &quot;It will be easy this time! We&#x27;ve got an existing plan we can use!&quot;<p>It&#x27;s like using a treasure map, not finding any treasure, and now thinking it will be even easier to find the treasure <i>now</i> since you already have a map!

An interesting article, and we need more like it, but I feel the author didn&#x27;t go far enough in understanding the root causes of complexity.<p>For example, they cite both schedule&#x2F;budget pressure, and insufficient docs. The <i>incomplete</i> docs were &quot;thousands&quot; of pages. Does anyone really believe even half the team would read &quot;complete&quot; documentation, that are thousands upon thousands of pages? Would complete docs speed up development time? Would they speed up development time even taking into account the cost of producing and consuming complete docs? Is the size of module truly essential complexity, or is part of the problem that they&#x27;re building on legacy code?<p>The author mentions interop with other teams and third party software as a large source of friction. Why are other modules so large and complex that they&#x27;re maintained by separate teams? Is that essential complexity, or was it caused by previous attempts to patch their way to release? Would the modules be more manageable, and hence, require smaller teams, if they used other practices&#x2F;languages&#x2F;tools?<p>Access to test hardware, and managing the test personnel was another source of friction. What is the cost of buying more test hardware? In previous companies where I&#x27;ve worked, with manual QA depts and under-funded test hardware budgets, doubling the hardware budget would allow halving the QA salary budget (primarily because you don&#x27;t need to hot-swap equipment several times a day), and shorten test cycles. Is that the case here?<p>Further, how much manual test is truly necessary, and how much is caused by the developers not writing automated tests?

Offhand and IMHO, some possibles can be:<p><pre><code> - fear or lack of understanding of a legacy codebase - fear or lack of understanding of a 3rd party component - time pressure - too many edge cases to handle - intra-team communication issues or stylistic differences - lack of domain experience to understand those edge cases - lack of time to build the correct design, or rebuild a design if it won&#x27;t fit - project management pressure against big-design-up-front and to &quot;start now&quot; when making something more organized is required - unclear requirements - not interested in work or company anymore - lack of use cases representing all possible usage scenarios - it&#x27;s actually not their code that was bad, but they are coupled to bad systems that are themselves bad&#x2F;leaky&#x2F;error-prone</code></pre>

For me it&#x27;s simple:<p>1. Lack of risk management 2. Poor project management 3. Allowing other to set my urgency (like deadlines but more psychological) 4. Not enforcing professional practises I know I should follow<p>3 and 4 are to all intents and purposes symptoms of 1 and 2

Interesting, but for me, there&#x27;s a key piece missing. What did they use to determine that a developer was &quot;good&quot; to begin with?

To mitigate these problems I try to always completely finish the current task including doc updates etc before moving to the next thing. I do this pretty much always even under management pressure. It can be awkward at times.

Good code doesn&#x27;t take more time than bad code. I think bad code takes more time than good code.

Does anyone recognize which company this study examined?

your bad code is somebody else&#x27;s good code.

I had to write bad code because sales and management usually dictate the timeline of the project.<p>As an example: sales promises new customer feature X in one month and we will lose money unless it&#x27;s implemented.<p>My choice is to either: 1) Complete it the right way in double the time or 2) use hacks and cut corners to get it done on time. Since non-technical people just see the output and not what&#x27;s going on underneath, they often times don&#x27;t see the difference and when they explain to the boss that they might lose money, it&#x27;s almost always option #2.<p>I hated being forced to do this so many times in my career, I started my own company.