Code Quality

If you look at the graphic above, how would you answer the following questions?

• Which door represents your code?

Answer the following questions:

• Why are we in this room?
• Is this just a normal code review or have we found a stream of production issues?
• How do you distinguish between good and bad code?

Bad Code

There are various reasons for so-called "bad code":

• Rushing the product to market
• Adding more and more features
• Incorrect project structure and workflow
• Time constraints: No time to do a good job
• Huge backlog (story points more important than quality)
• Postponing bug and quality improvements until tomorrow ("We'll do it later", but "Later equals never" - LeBlanc's law)

Total cost of owning a mess

A developer can be slowed down by someone else's messy code. Over time, for example, every change to the code breaks two or three other pieces of code. As a result, the mess gets bigger and bigger and in the end you can no longer clean it up. This reduces the productivity of the team. Management then often tends to hire more employees to increase productivity. The pressure on the team to increase productivity is enormous, which can then lead to more and more chaos and, in the end, productivity continues to fall towards zero.

But what is the solution to this problem? A major redesign? Or a new Tiger team - similar to a Greenfield project - the best and brightest developers are selected for this and everyone else continues to maintain the current system?

The answer is quite clearly: No!

This is relatively easy to explain. Two teams would be in a kind of race. The Tiger team builds a new system that can do everything the old system can do and has to keep up with the changes to the old system (this can take up to 10 years). The original members of the Tiger team may no longer be around, and the current members will demand a redesign because the new system is a huge mess.

Code Quality

But what exactly is code quality?

A simple definition is: "An indicator of how quickly your developers can add business value to your software application."

Next Coding Tuesday we want to take a closer look.