Object Mentor Blog: Crap Code Inevitable? Rumblings from ACCU.

Crap Code Inevitable? Rumblings from ACCU.

Uncle Bob — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:56:22 -0500

I gave the opening Keynote at ACCU 2009 on Wednesday. It was entitled: The Birth of Craftsmanship. Nicolai Josuttis finshed the day with the closing keynote: Welcome Crappy Code – The Death of Code Quality. It was like a blow to the gut.

In my keynote I attempted to show the historical trajectory that has led to the emergence of the software craftsmanship movement. My argument was that since the business practices of SCRUM have been widely adopted, and since teams who follow those practices but do not follow the technical practices of XP experience a relentless decrease in velocity, and since that decrease in velocity is exposed by the transparency of scrum, then if follows that the eventual adoption of those technical XP practices is virtually assured. My conclusion was that Craftsmanship was the “next big thing” (tm) that would capture the attention of our industry for the next few years, driven by the business need to increase velocity. (See Martin Fowler’s blog on Flaccid Scrum) In short, we are on a trajectory towards a higher degree of professionalism and craftsmanship.

Nicolai’s thesis was the exact opposite of mine. His argument was that we are all ruled by marketing and that businesses will do whatever it takes to cut costs and increase revenue, and therefore businesses will drive software quality inexorably downward. He stipulated that this will necessarily create a crisis as the defect rates and deadline slips increased, but that all attempts to improve quality would be short lived and followed by a larger drive to decrease quality even further.

Josuttis’ talk was an hour of highly depressing rhetoric couched in articulate delivery and brilliant humor. One of the more memorable moments came when he playacted how a manger would respond to a developer’s plea to let them write clean code like Uncle Bob says. The manager replies: “I don’t care what Uncle Bob says, and if you don’t like it you can leave and take Uncle Bob with you.”

One of the funnier moments came when Josuttis came up with his rules for crap code, one of which was “Praise Copy and Paste”. Here he showed the evolution of a module from the viewpoint of clean code, and then from the viewpoint of copy-paste. His conclusion, delivered with a lovely irony, was the the copy-paste solution was more maintainable because it was clear which code belonged to which version.

It was at this point that I thought that this whole talk was a ribald joke, an elaborate spoof. I predicted that he was about to turn the tables on everyone and ringingly endorse the craftsmanship movement.

Alas, it was not so. In the end he said that he was serious about his claims, and that he was convinced that crap code would dominate our future. And then he gave his closing plea which went like this:

We finally accepted that requirements change, and so we invented Agile.

We must finally accept that code will be crap and so we must ???

He left the question marks on the screen and closed the talk.

This was like a blow to the gut. The mood of the conference changed, at least for me, from a high of enthralled geekery, to depths of hoplessness and feelings of futile striving against the inevitable. Our cause was lost. Defeat was imminent. There was no hope.

Bulls Bollocks!

To his credit, there are a few things that Josuttis got right. There is a lot of crap code out there. And there is a growing cohort of crappy coders writing that crap code.

But the solution to that is not to give up and become one of them. The solution to that is to design our systems so that they don’t require an army of maintainers slinging code. Instead we need to design our systems such that the vast majority of changes can be implemented in DSLs that are tuned to business needs, and do not require “programmers” to maintain.

The thing that Josuttis got completely wrong, in my mildly arrogant opinion, is the notion that low quality code is cheaper than high quality code. Low quality code is not cheaper; it is vastly more expensive, even in the short term. Bad code slows everyone down from the minute that it is written. It creates a continuous and copious drag on further progress. It requires armies of coders to overcome that drag; and those armies must grow exponentially to maintain constant velocity against that drag.

This strikes at the very heart of Josuttis’ argument. His claim that crappy code is inevitable is based on the notion that crappy code is cheaper than clean code, and that therefore businesses will demand the crap every time. But it has generally not been business that has demanded crappy code. Rather it has been developers who mistakenly thought that the business’ need for speed meant that they had to produce crappy code. Once we, as professional developers, realize that the only way to go fast is to create clean and well designed code, then we will see the business’ need for speed as a demand for high quality code.

My vision of the future is quite different from Josuttis’. I see software developers working together to create a discipline of craftsmanship, professionalism, and quality similar to the way that doctors, lawyers, architects, and many other professionals and artisans have done. I see a future where team velocities increase while development costs decrease because of the steadily increasing skill of the teams. I see a future where large software systems are engineered by relatively small teams of craftsmen, and are configured and customized by business people using DSLs tuned to their needs.

I see a future of Clean Code, Craftsmanship, Professionalism, and an overriding imperative for Code Quality.

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"Crap Code Inevitable? Rumblings from ACCU." by sam

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:48:55 -0600

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"Crap Code Inevitable? Rumblings from ACCU." by Alex

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:55:42 -0600

I think Bob forgot to think about globalization. What if developers become 2 or 3 times cheaper than previously thought by the management. They have more to learn than to think bout craftman ship. In this light Nicos arguments are a sheer fact.

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"Crap Code Inevitable? Rumblings from ACCU." by Tim Ottinger

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:31:31 -0600

I propose an axiom: The marketing and support people want the code to be buildable, just as much as the software developers want it to be marketable and supportable.

That leaves us with “so how much do they want it?” and “what will they do about it?” as more interesting questions.

In introverted organizations with siloed departments, they don’t want it very much. The introverted point of view is “if everyone else worked harder, my job would be easier” which is true and useless. If departments are competing, then they don’t want it much at all (the enemy of my enemy). Still the degree of desire is mutual.

In badly-organized orgs, they want it very much but they don’t know how to connect the desires together.

In an agile organization, these three concerns have a forum in the “whole team”, which should result in better releases of better code to a more appreciative audience with decreasing support costs. When they don’t result in improvements, then the whole team concept is where things have fallen down.

Introverted organizations (departments, teams, companies, etc) are good places for things to fall apart.

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"Crap Code Inevitable? Rumblings from ACCU." by The Berliner

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 12:37:26 -0500

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"Crap Code Inevitable? Rumblings from ACCU." by Norbert Winklareth

Wed, 27 May 2009 11:39:01 -0500

Mr. Smith, the problem is that there are no irrefutable numbers as they are situational, there are however irrefutable models. It is has long been determined, not only in software field but in many others, see Managing the Design Factory that the earlier defects are removed the less the overall cost of developing and maintaining a product. Professor Khaled El Emam has researched, developed and tested predictive economic models that show The ROI from Software Quality. A more recent, 2009 versus 2005, cross industry model that shows that investing in quality and learning leads to superior performance see Stephen Spear’s Chasing the Rabbit.

By the way, just because there are these irrefutable models and or numbers does not of itself insure adoption of a practice, technique or methodology. As proof I submit:

Nato Science committee report on the 1968 conference on Software Engineering
Barry Boehm’s Software Engineering Economics, first published in 1981.

Both of these publications show the need and/or irrefutable benefits of improving quality, yet neither resulted in wide-spread adoption within the development community or the businesses that use the services of this community. Note that this is true of all industries as Mr Spear has shown in his book, so for me this is a basic human problem and we know that we can change.

"Crap Code Inevitable? Rumblings from ACCU." by JM

Wed, 13 May 2009 08:36:09 -0500

It would be interesting to know what people think is quality code, crap code, best practice, etc.

"Crap Code Inevitable? Rumblings from ACCU." by Dave D

Thu, 07 May 2009 07:34:35 -0500

Unfortunately, at least where I work, those of us who consider ourselves professionals, and try to maintain a level of craftsmanship are finding ourselves more and more outsourced. We are finding that the code we are getting is pure crap. The level of expertise demonstrated in the code that I have seen is abysmal; it appears that the developers have recently completed a 6 week course in Java. My attempts to encourage best practices have been met with disdain and an attitude that I have no idea what I’m talking about.

"Crap Code Inevitable? Rumblings from ACCU." by Eric Smith

Mon, 04 May 2009 10:13:08 -0500

” ... Low quality code is not cheaper; it is vastly more expensive … “

Where are the numbers, Uncle Bob? This kind of argument will continue until someone can put some solid, irrefutable numbers against all of this; and in a way that is accessible to decision makers: http://skepticabin.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/the-great-microsoft-imposed-development-culture/.