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Re: standards

From: david wendelken <davewendelken_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 05:52:48 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <23487572.1091710368327.JavaMail.root@beaker.psp.pas.earthlink.net>


>I know what you are trying to say, but in my requirements
>I'd rather _ignore_ it than ponder over it.

In projects that I run, I don't **care** what the programmers "would rather do" on some issues. "When others then null;" is one of them. I tell newly assigned programmers they will be fired if they use it without my permission. Period. No ifs, no buts, just summarily fired.

No offense, but I've had to clean up after far too many programmers who couldn't be bothered to find and fix the problem so they just swept it under the rug with that coding style. For every time I've seen it used in an appropriate manner, I've seen it mis-used thousands of times. I've seen millions of dollars of taxpayer's money wasted because the systems built that way couldn't work correctly because of coding behaviour driven by attitudes like that.

On projects that I do not run, and where I find the problem to be rampant, I ask the management if they are happy with the number of defects reported and the amount of money it costs to fix them. If they are not, then I show them some bad examples of code in their system (that's a thing rarely in short supply :(, and explain how those bad coding practices contribute to the high cost of system downtime and maintenance. (I'll give them some simple metrics (such as "This money-wasting practice occured 127 times in just 7 programs. Fixing these problems at the source is the cheapest way to drive down your maintenance costs." In other words, I don't treat it as a professional IT practices issue, I treat it as a business-level time and money issue. Much more likely to get management buy-in that way.    



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Received on Thu Aug 05 2004 - 07:48:40 CDT

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