Pramatr Blog

Over the past few years, I’ve worked on numerous projects that have grown very quickly but have lacked a structured approach to development. The code is grown somewhat organically, being used in ways never imagined and bent into shapes it was never supposed to make. In the very worst cases, it ended up with Spaghetti Code that is self-obfuscating and unintelligible (even to the original author).

To help prevent this situation, teams need to embrace processes to help introduce structure and discipline to software development. This can be daunting to some teams at first, but it’s a far more productive and appealing than a team that is constantly under-pressure with various fire-fighting activities.

Kent Beck has said previously that he is not a great programmer but just a pretty good programmer with great habits. I’m a firm believer in that statement, and I think that any team that doesn’t try to develop those habits is starting from a weakened position. I’ve worked on both projects that embraced change and tried to improve their development process and also those that didn’t. I would sooner work on the former type of project every time.

With that in mind, there are very simple changes you can make to a project to help foster better habits. None of these techniques is new or groundbreaking (at least anymore), but I am still amazed at the number of projects that still don’t embrace them. There is plenty of information on these techniques out there, so there is no excuse if you want to do some more reading.
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