Last Friday, September 23 2022, I attended an Agile Conference #BETTERWAYS2022 and I have to say that its great to be back in person for a conference. The last few years with the pandemic I have didn’t had the change to meet and talk with people in the community in person and it is something I have been missing.
I attended an interesting talk was from Adam Tornhill presenting a research study to evaluate the business impact of bad code quality, using metrics like number of bugs/time spent in development/predictability of resolving issues on time. He developed a tool(and company) to measure code quality and a constant issue he faced was trying to convince management to spent time improving parts of the codebase with poor code quality.
He collected data from customers(from version control and Jira) and did the research to give scientific rigor to the claims for the effect of bad code quality. The paper with the findings was published to Proc. of International Conference on Technical Debt 2022. And replication data are available. He also gave advice on prioritizing improving efforts on files most frequently edited by developers.
The depressing truth is that even with these findings management seems to prefer sort term gains win over long term maintainability. I suspect that this is more than simply hyperbolic discounting.
The question from the business people will always be Who will pay for this? or What revenue stream it is connected too?
One thing I get out of every conference I attend is a list of noteworthy books recommendations usually presented in a slide with a profound quote taken from the book.
Looking forward to the next learning experience!