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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Mon, 06 Feb 2012 01:58:59 -0600

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"Crap Code Inevitable? Rumblings from ACCU." by Funky faucets

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 08:47:30 -0600

Not only software, anything with the quality brought down brings down also the whole business. Wise developers will focus on the quality and the long term gain will be theirs.

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Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:04:41 -0600

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Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:23:31 -0600

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Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:51:05 -0600

Great way to write, seems I was reading a novel, I loved it at the moment where everything is so technical and the world is in full swing there is nothing better than reading articles like this, to give us a break and go on with our daily tasks . Excellent.

"Crap Code Inevitable? Rumblings from ACCU." by Relationship Repair Guides

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:28:06 -0600

Uncle Bob, really great info as usual! Codes are great, but only if used by the right hands. Else, you know what nightmares that can lead to!

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Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:26:13 -0600

Uncle Bob – I agree that developers will in time will begin to implement higher quality code. I think this is a natural progression as the initial start-up costs of a new venture are absorbed, and developers push out higher quality sites. As websites begin to pay more for expanded bandwidth, there will be a premium placed on cleaner code sites. So, Jossutis will ultimately be proven wrong.

Thanks,

Ricardo

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Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:33:02 -0600

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Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:30:34 -0600

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Sun, 01 Jan 2012 09:56:18 -0600

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Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:29:48 -0600

The quality of he developers is the most important thing

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Sat, 24 Dec 2011 20:17:54 -0600

Should stick to fewer developers making a better job! Marry Christmas

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Wordpress through its versioning system actively works to solve many of the poor code problems of the early versions. As the developers continue to refine the CMS, the code will get progressively more clean. thanks for the interesting blog.

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Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:54:40 -0600

I really like this statement “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.” The only thing is I don’t believe this is going to be possible in the near future. Some day, yes maybe, but still I think we need to grow more to reach that point!