Object Mentor Blog: Sufficient Design means Damned Good Design.

Sufficient Design means Damned Good Design.

Uncle Bob — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:02:10 -0500

@JoshuaKerievsky wrote a blog entitled “Sufficient Design”.

Josh makes this point:

‘Yet some programmers argue that the software design quality of every last piece of code ought to be as high as possible. “Produce clean code or you are not a software craftsman!”’

He goes on to say:

“Yet ultimately the craftsmanship advice fails to consider simple economics: If you take the time to craft code of little or moderate value to users, you’re wasting time and money.”

Now this sounds like heresy, and I can imagine that software craftsmanship supporters (like me) are ready to storm the halls of Industrial Logic and string the blighter up by his toenails!

But hold on there craftsmen, don’t get the pitchforks out yet. Look at the scenario that Josh describes. It’s quite revealing.

Josh’s example of “not being a craftsman” is his niggling worry over a function that returns a string but in one derivative case ought to return a void.

Horrors! Horrors! He left a bit of evolved cruft in the design! Revoke his craftsman license and sick the dogs on him!

Ah, but wait. He also says that he spent a half-day trying to refactor this into a better shape but eventually had to give up.

The fool! The nincompoop! The anti-craftsman! A pox on him and all his ilk!

OK, enough hyperbole. It seems to me that Josh was behaving exactly as a craftsman should. He was worrying about exactly the kinds of things a craftsman ought to worry about. He was making the kinds of pragmatic decisions a craftsman ought to make. He was not leaving a huge mess in the system and rushing on to the next feature to implement. Instead he was taking care of his code. The fact that he put so much energy, time, and thought into such a small issue as an inconsistent return type speaks volumes for Josh’s integrity as a software craftsman.

So, as far as Josh Kerievsky is concerned “Sufficient Design” is “Pretty Damned Good Design”.

Look, all our software will have little tiny warts. There’s no such thing as a perfect system. Craftsmen like Josh work hard to keep those warts as small as possible, and to sequester them into parts of the system where they can do the least harm.

So the only aspect of Josh’s post that I disagree with is his contention that the “craftsman” message is one of unrelenting perfection. Craftsmen are first and foremost pragmatists. They seek very high quality code; but they are not so consumed with perfection that they make foolish economic tradeoffs.

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