Quality Time

In case you didn’t know, there has been a round of squabbling going because of Joel Spolsky’s post on Duct Tape Programmers. Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) has a good response that argues against shipping low quality code. Everyone else is trying to make this into a dichotomy, though it simply feels like one individual puts more priority on release date, while the later puts more priority on code professionalism. Maybe it is because of the recession, but both could be happy if we could just throw more resources at it, in theory.

The age old idiom, show the above triangle, agree that Quality should be high, while Cost and Time should be low. Then you say, “I know all three are desired, but please only pick two”. Money must be limited on most projects these days, reducing the question to priority on Quality or Time?

Since Uncle Bob is a huge proponent of TDD, his main focus for quality is surrounding unit testing, while Joel is focused on individuals that can make nearly anything “work” quickly. Joel shrugs off unit testing as a lofty goal for academics and Uncle Bob focuses more on the common ground between the two and agreeing simplicity should be favored.

Personally, I see the relationship as follows.

Shipping Late > Shipping Shit > Not Shipping

Not shipping or not writing a hack or two to get the product out the door is your worst option. If the product doesn’t go live, all your effort is for nothing. However, hacking the entire thing out the door because proper design and testing takes too much “Time” is only going to paint you into a corner. Sure you will ship something faster than your competitors and maybe that is all your care about. You must consider some important things before saying all that matters is time. Will your customers want to use it? Probably not. Will the developers want to maintain and enhance it? Probably not.

Clearly Time and Quality are important, otherwise they wouldn’t be on the triangle. The key is to balance them appropriately, which is what most individuals are saying. Zealous animosity against or for unit testing aside, the entire argument is subjective. Consider what your demands are and plan appropriately.