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Do You Write Clean Code?
While cruising through technical books on Amazon.com I came across a book by Robert C. Martin entitled, “Clean Code – A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship.” The following quote was taken from the book, which convinced me to put it on my “TO READ” list.
Robert Writes:
“I know of one company that, in the late 80s, wrote a killer app. It was very popular, and lots of professionals bought and used it. But then the release cycles began to stretch. Bugs were not repaired from one release to the next. Load times grew and crashes increased. I remember the day I shut the product down in frustration and never used it again. The company went out of business a short time after that.
Two decades later I met one of the early employees of that company and asked him what had happened. The answer confirmed my fears. They had rushed the product to market and had made a huge mess in the code. As they added more and more features, the code got worse and worse until they simply could not manage it any longer. It was the bad code that brought the company down."
This concept has been labeled Technical Debt. It is just as heavy a load as monetary debt if it keeps you from delivering needed software. This story emphasizes the fact that Clean Code is not really a free ride to a quick release.
Three step process you may consider:
- Write code to meet the software requirements
- Refactor the code using exposed software patterns
- Optimize as needed
Do you write clean code? Can you afford not to? Share your thoughts or experiences by writing to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
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