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Windows & .NET Watch: Quality: You are gonna need it


By Larry O'Brien
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March 2, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 3)
One of the guiding principles this past decade has been YAGNI: You Ain't Gonna’ Need It. YAGNI is a quick cure for the disease of Analysis Paralysis, whose symptoms include creeping scope, inactive version control systems and uncontrolled growth of class diagrams.

YAGNI does have side effects, however. Hyperyagnic Disorder results from abandoning too much structure and can be every bit as harmful as Analysis Paralysis. The disorder is characterized by brittleness of code, difficulty in understanding intent, and growth in the size, but not the number, of source code files. Consult your doctor if you experience a nested loop more than four levels deep.

Less flippantly, Analysis Paralysis and Hyperyagnic Disorder characterize too much and too little mental abstraction in the development process.

Software development is a game of balancing abstraction. Too much abstraction, and you find yourself reinventing e-mail. Too little abstraction, and you cram your entire system into a single webpage. The success of abstractions in code drives us to seek abstractions in our development processes; the unwavering demands of compilers drive us to think that we need to shut up and code. Over the course of a decade, common wisdom swings between one extreme and another.

There’s recently been a dustup among the twittering classes as to the proper amount of YAGNI. Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fog Creek Software, has advocated an extreme YAGNI stance, swiping along the way an over-reliance on unit tests and the so-called SOLID principles laid out by “Uncle Bob” Robert Martin. Spolsky dramatically overreached, claiming that those advocating high percentages of unit test coverage or promoting SOLID design principles had “not written a lot of code.”

Robert Martin has written a lot of code and needs no defense from me. On a personal level, each of the last three systems I've architected, while not particularly large, have gone from bogged down to shipped to transacting tens of millions of dollars per month. When I look at troubled teams today, I see Hyperyagnic Disorder far more than I see Analysis Paralysis. When I interview job applicants, Architecture Astronauts (as Spolsky labels them) are relatively rare compared to Cowboy Coders who are willing to abandon any semblance of discipline in the face of a looming deadline.


Related Search Term(s): testing

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Comments


03/02/2009 06:37:47 PM EST

Larry, I love how you end this: "Quality is the route to productivity. If you need productivity, you need quality. Quality can be improved with a balanced emphasis on code production, testing and design. You’re gonna need all those things." We are rabid about code quality at NCOVER. Bad product sap the morale of the programmers who have to get involved to fix them. It just sucks. Here is one thing that we have noticed: Most developers don't want to write bad code; they just plan for any other option... DEW @danwaldo

United StatesDaniel Waldschmidt


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