[dba-Tech] The dark side of programming craftmanship

Salakhetdinov Shamil mcp2004 at mail.ru
Tue Jan 29 10:55:07 CST 2013


 Hi Jim --

The article is good, thank you.

For me a "software craftsmen" are the ones who are able to incur and handle/balance the technical debt the most effective way whatever size of software application (system) they are working on and whatever working context/environment they are operating in:  "alone wolf", small soft-dev shop, middle- or large soft-dev. company.

"Technical debt" term was first introduced by Ward Cunningham in 1992(!) -  http://c2.com/doc/oopsla92.html  - but it has got mainstream approval AFAIS only in the middle of 00-ies thanks to Martin Fowler ( http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html ) and others works coming from broad experience of everyday software development practice.

Technical debt can be *introduced unintentionally* or *incurred intentionally* ( http://blogs.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2007/11/01/technical-debt-2.aspx ) - I'm mentioning here *intentionally incurred technical debt*.

To effectively handle technical debt modern software development has got practical methodologies, the most important in my opinion are eXtreme Programming practices (Kent Beck,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming_practices ) from which 

- relatively small development iterations planning based on business value;
- test-driven development and
- coding standards

are the main three practices, and tools as e.g. Resharper ( http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/ ).

In any event - "a mess is not a technical debt" -  https://sites.google.com/site/unclebobconsultingllc/a-mess-is-not-a-technical-debt . (Although what is "the real mess" - opinions vary significantly.)

Thank you.

-- Shamil

Понедельник, 28 января 2013, 19:52 -08:00 от "Jim Lawrence" <accessd at shaw.ca>:
>As a programmer, my work quality (not functionality) falls into all sort of
>categories.
>
>Sometimes, it is a rush to crank out code that I will be loathe to admit to
>and other times in long term contracts, the code is a "thing of beauty". All
>quick hacks and mashups and eloquently designed code has put food on table. 
>
>Here is an interesting article on that subject (PS there is also a beautiful
>Japanese parable that puts our coding into perspective.):
>
>http://www.javaworld.com/community/?q=node/8649
>
>Jim 
>
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