Re: need reference on "when to rewrite"

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On Wed, 13 Jun 2007 19:37:18 -0700, Arne Vajhøj <arne@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I doubt that the QA people and the project manager likes that
approach ...

Well, a) who cares? IMHO, having the code be correct is more important than some political games. And b) I never had any complaints from those people along those lines. In fact, if anything, the biggest complaint my testers had was that their bug find rate was too low when they were working in my areas of a project.

Probably the biggest disadvantage to my approach was that most of my career I've been in environments in which the two biggest review criteria were how fast do you call yourself "feature complete" and how many bugs can you fix after "feature complete" (the more, the better). That environment strongly encourages sloppy coding, because not only can you get the code done quickly, you can introduce LOTS of bugs that then add to your bug fix count.

I would invariably get less code written than other people, and then have fewer bugs to fix than those same people (in fact, I never had enough bugs to fully occupy my time, so I always wound up fixing other people's bugs too, but that takes a lot more time than fixing bugs in code you're familiar with), leading to poor performance reviews. But I view programming as an art and a craft, and I just don't see myself sacrificing quality in my art just to please some silly review structure.

I realize that the industry standard is to cobble something up as quickly as possible, and then try to work out all the little wrinkles after the fact. But the industry standard is also to release incredibly crappy code. That's just not how I work.

Pete
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