It’s often the case that in the industry,  people will do research on particular software engineering methodology, or a team will publish a post-mortem in which they talk about a particular style of working and how successful it was for them. And the discussions following those posts will usually descend into an argument, with different people chiming in on how they tried that methodology, and it was rubbish, or how their own methodology (or ideal methodology) is better.

This sort of debate annoys me, because it’s always couched in absolutes. In software engineering there are no absolutes. So I felt I had to respond when someone declared, without much in the way of context:

No they shouldn’t. At least, not unless your team ethos supports it.

Just like all of these statements about how things should or shouldn’t be done, there is a whole bunch of context needed before you can say whether or not a strategy is successful or not. You can’t just look at those stats and say “TDD is the way to go”, or “asserts should be everywhere and always on”.

Every last one of these tenets of development requires a particular way of working before it is viable and/or usable. Asserts are great, as long as the team ethos is to never (or nearly never) allow them into a live build. What do you think you get if you just turn asserts on everywhere, when the build is riddled with conditions which aren’t show-stoppers, but which result in asserts? You get designers and artists that can’t use the build any more, and everyone gets pissed off.

Similarly, what do you get if you have a team which is notionally doing TDD, but in fact many of the developers aren’t structuring their code to support complete tests, or have incomplete test coverage where it counts? You get slower development, without a great decrease in the number of defects, and now you’ve got less time to fix them when it comes time to ship.

People should stop looking for one-stop, quick fix solutions to the problems which all development teams have. Every last one of these solutions will a) make things worse if applied in a half arsed way, and b) stem from an underlying mentality which is “what can we do to improve maintainability, increase coder efficiency, and smooth out problems in our day to day development?”

Sure, read the stats, read other people’s techniques, but for the love of Mike, don’t try to just stamp a particular technique on your development team and expect it to improve your lot. Instead, take a long hard look at your day-to-day process, identify the root of the problems that your team actually has, and take small incremental steps to fix those problems. Repeat ad-infinitum (or until you ship).

More than anything though, make sure any steps you do take work with the team you currently have, not with some ideal team that you’ve read about. If you find yourself applying a solution which will only work if everyone has a certain mentality or set of skills, then you’d better make damned sure that your team has those things before you try to apply the fix.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 12th, 2010 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Coding, Random Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.