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A Culture of Fear


By Allen Holub
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April 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 3)
As I write this column in mid-March, the venerable SD West conference (www.sdexpo.com) is just winding down. SD West is still one of the best conferences out there if you’re interested in actually learning something. Its sessions are all tutorials, and there’s absolutely no vendor hype—a refreshing change from Microsoft’s Tech-Ed, Sun’s JavaOne and the other big vendor conferences. A few thoughts came to mind while listening to this year’s keynotes, which I’d like to share here.

My first thought was that none of the keynotes covered bold new territory, but the talks were still topical because people just aren’t developing software in a way that works, even though we know how to do just that. How is it that we, as a profession, can know how to get the job done, but we just don’t do it?

ObjectMentor’s Robert Martin, in his keynote, asked if anyone had ever had to work on a piece of code so hideously complicated that it took forever to get even a simple change to work? Everybody raised their hands. He then asked, “So, why did you write it that way?” which engendered a nervous laugh from most of the crowd.

We do write bad code all the time for bad reasons. Some idiotic manager telling us to use AJAX, Web services, application servers and all sorts of other junk to implement a facility that could be written in 20 minutes using a simple socket—that’s all too common.

When it comes to software development, there are very few revolutionary ideas. The most recent example of a truly great idea is the notion of agile processes, which I learned about by reading Kent Beck’s “Extreme Programming Explained” about six years ago.

Few of Beck’s ideas were truly new, but a few stand out as truly inspired. Pair programming and test-driven development, for example. Even now, six years later, it’s still a struggle to get companies to put these ideas into practice, and that reluctance mystifies me.




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