Business People Don’t Think They Care About Clean Code

Do business people care about clean code? They behave like they don’t. Well, they do and I can prove it using proof by contradiction. For the best results, read this proof first.

Suppose that a business person does not care about clean code. The business person wants features and they want them fast. So they pressure engineers to just get the code working. This causes the code to deteriorate. The business person wants more features, but the code is a mess so features take longer to add and things that work start to break. If the business person wants features fast, they need clean code and if they need clean code they must care about it too, which contradicts the statement that business people don’t care about clean code. The contradiction proves the original supposition to be false, proving that business people care about code structure, even if they don’t realize it.

Engineers and Programmers, Stop Writing So Much Firmware

(this article is not just for embedded developers)

A few months back I was reading Doug Schmidt’s blog, on The Growing Importance of Sustaining Software for the DoD, and he made the claim

“although software does not wear out, firmware and hardware become obsolete, thereby requiring software modifications”.

It was a bit of a clarifying moment for me. Doug clarified two terms that I suppose were obvious, or maybe not. Software is this thing that can have a long useful life, where firmware is going to be regularly be made obsolete as hardware evolves.

I’d like to add to Doug’s statement:

although software does not wear out, it can be destroyed from within by unmanaged dependencies on firmware and hardware.

Think of all the code denied the potential long life of software due to being infected with dependencies on hardware.
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“TDD ignores the design” “No it doesn’t” “Yes it does” – Part 1

TDD ignores design; that is a frequently stated misconception. Many people get this idea from the code focus of TDD. TDD does not call for the creation of any non-executable design documentation. So the questioning developer gets the idea that there is no design. But I say, “yes there is”.
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