It calculated that the opportunity cost of this inefficient use of developer time reached around $85bn annually. This may be an extreme example - the explosion caused an estimated loss of $370m - but problems with complex or inaccessible code can cost countless hours and significant resources at any business.Ī 2018 study by Stripe found that the average software developer spends around 17 hours a week on maintenance issues such as debugging, and nearly four hours a week working to clean up ‘bad code’. Why is it a problem? Well, in 1996 the Ariane 5 space rocket self-destructed seconds after lift-off due to a single software bug that had been inadvertently copied over from the software used for the Ariane 4 launches. A codebase is usually considered ‘bad’ when it is overly complex, hard to understand or maintain, has too many dependencies, or simply doesn’t do what it is supposed to (at least, not in the most efficient way).
However, there are some general red flags that all developers will know about. Moreover, almost all code can be improved over time, particularly as programming languages evolve and new solutions emerge. It can be overly simplistic to think of code in binary terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ - rating code is a value judgment relative to the context in which it is being read and used. If they have to spend hours or days trying to understand it before they can fix a minor problem, then something ain’t right! In the real world, it’s almost certain that someone else will eventually need to read and modify your code. It doesn’t matter how beautiful a new app may look, if the underlying code is hard to read then it’s going to be a problem to maintain, update or scale it. In the rush to advance software development and streamline project management, writing high-quality code may not always be considered a priority. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." - Martin Fowler.
"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand.
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