James Schorr, the owner of Tech Rescue has a guest post on the Ruby Learning blog where he asks “Do You Enjoy Your Code Quality?” He makes a strong argument for treating programming as craftsmanship writing that the goal of his article is to help people improve code quality and “transform the mundane into the beautiful.”
Schorr offers a number of tips for pre- through post-development of projects, and while some of his points may be geared towards independent consultants and independent developers, they’re pretty applicable to anyone:
Pre-Development
- Gather all the requirements from clients up front. Schorr recommends thinking of these in terms of “stories” as “it’s more in line with how the non-developer thinks.”
- Clarify what is necessary and what’s just “nice-to-have.”
- Refuse to reproduce lousy code. In other words, turn down work if you’re going to be asked to reproduce a poorly designed system – unless you are being given the freedom to do it right. (This begs the question, of course: How do you define “lousy code”?)
- Reject unrealistic timelines
Development
- Out-engineer user-error as much as possible. “In other words,” writes Schorr, “never trust that the user will do what you expect, especially when entering data.”
- Be open to including other languages and technologies where appropriate.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Post-Development
- Review your code for speed, stability, security, and usability.
- Have non-technical people do real-world testing on your product.
- Revisit old code periodically and see what you would’ve done differently.
How do you achieve quality programming? What makes a bit of code into something like Schorr describes as “craftsmanship”?
