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Issue No. 37 (March - April 2006)
Diomidis Spinellis The ability to spot substandard code is crucial both for programmers and software development managers. As programmers when we encounter bad code we know we have to take a defensive stance: plan for more development time, expect bugs to crop out of nowhere, and anticipate that small changes may require significant rework. Ideally, we should also arrange for an opportunity to give the code a facelift, refactoring the worse designed elements and correcting style problems. As managers (for others or of our own work) when we find bad code we need to take a step back and evaluate the situation. Why am I or my group writing this trash? Are there schedule pressures or insufficient incentives for writing brilliant code, is there a need for more training, better design, different development practices? Download List of working papers |