ObjectMentor takes on the idea that Business Software is Messy and Ugly
The developers responded to my message with enthusiasm. They want to do a good job (of course!) They just didn’t know they were authorized to do good work. They thought they had to make messes. But I told them that the only way to get things done quickly, and keep getting things done quickly, is to create the cleanest code they can, to work as well as possible, and keep the quality very high. I told them that quick-and-dirty is an oxymoron. Dirty always means slow.
I agree totally.
But this assumes a perfect world. Where you have time and money to get in a consultant to synchronise the code-quality of a dozen engineers of differing backgrounds and experience (and dare I say it, bad habits). Uncle Bob of ObjectMentor is also talking about the code. Code can be clean, well commented and refactored but it still might make business software an ugly mess because the issues I see with business software a different.
It’s not that the code is bad.
It’s that it was built by engineers for engineers. Or that it assumes too much knowledge of the business in order to operate. Or that they didn’t bother with UI testing because they had a release date to beat. The excuses are may but none of them point a finger at the code itself and say “Ewwwwwww”