Someone said this to me:
"We never get a
chance to clean up ABC code or to refactor it.”
My reply:
The business will never
explicitly give you that time. It’s up to you (indeed, all of us) as
professional developers to not use deadlines as excuses. There is no deadline
in the world that should cause a seasoned developer to duplicate code. It’s up
to us, with a commitment to quality, to push back when we’re told to hurry. If
we don’t do that, who will? It’s professional negligence to use deadlines as
excuses. Most businesses think they have done good project management work if
they get the developers to hurry and produce the end result more quickly. They
don’t realize how much they’re hurting themselves in the long run by
sacrificing maintainable code.
Many times deadlines are
arbitrary guesses that folks came up with at the beginning of a project.
They’re meaningless. They’re actually worse than meaningless because being
forced to hit them is detrimental to quality. It’s okay to let the business
know that the work won’t be done “on time.” Many developers think they’re
trapped into hitting a deadline, when if they just did quality work, and
explained the situation to the business, the “deadline” could be moved, or code
could be time-boxed. Sacrificing quality, to the degree that I’ve seen in ABC code, should never be an option.
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