We are tired of writing crap!
To begin, a quote:
Why is there a software craftsmanship movement? What motivated it? What drives it now? One thing; and one thing only.
We are tired of writing crap.
That's it. The fat lady sang. Good nite Gracy. Over and out.
We're tired of writing crap. We are tired of embarrassing ourselves and our employers by delivering lousy software. We have had enough of telling our customers to reboot at midnight. We don't want bug lists that are a thousand pages long. We don't want code that grows more tangled and corrupt with every passing day. We're tired of doing a bad job. We want to start doing a good job.
That's ... what ... this ... is ... about. Nothing else.
What we are not doing:
- We are not putting code at the center of everything.
- We are not turning inward and ignoring the business and the customer.
- We are not inspecting our navels.
- We are not offering cheap certifications.
- We are not forgetting that our job is to delight our customers.
What we will not do anymore:
- We will not make messes in order to meet a schedule.
- We will not accept the stupid old lie about cleaning things up later.
- We will not believe the claim that quick means dirty.
- We will not accept the option to do it wrong.
- We will not allow anyone to force us to behave unprofessionally.
What we will do from now on:
- We will meet our schedules by knowing that the only way to go fast is to go well.
- We will delight our customers by writing the best code we can.
- We will honor our employers by creating the best designs we can.
- We will honor our team by testing everything that can be tested.
- We will be humble enough to write those tests first.
- We will practice so that we become better at our craft.
- We will remember what our grandmothers and grandfathers told us:
- Anything worth doing is worth doing well.
- Slow and steady wins the race.
- Measure twice cut once.
- Practice, Practice, Practice.
This is a repost from Uncle Bob Martin's blog of a message in response to a lot of the confusion and acrimony directed at the ideas behind Software Craftmanship.
The primary message: We are tired of writing crap is one I feel very strongly about, and I'm convinced that the fast pace of agile development isn't mutually exclusive with the notion of producing well tested, well thought out and well designed software.
As Uncle Bob mirrors completely my beliefs about how we should be developing software and articulates them far better than I could, please head on over to his blog and read the article in full.
