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Is Process Killing the Software Industry?
blackbearnh writes "We all know by now that Test Driven Development is a best practice. And so is having 100% of your code reviewed. And 70% unit test coverage. And keeping your CCN complexity numbers below 20. And doing pre-sprint grooming of stories. And a hundred other industry 'best practices' that in isolation seem like a great idea. But at the end of the day, how much time does it leave for developers to be innovative and creative? A piece on O'Reilly Radar argues that excessive process in software development is sucking the life out of passionate developers, all in the name of making sure that 'good code' gets written. 'The underlying feedback loop making this progressively worse is that passionate programmers write great code, but process kills passion. Disaffected programmers write poor code, and poor code makes management add more process in an attempt to "make" their programmers write good code. That just makes morale worse, and so on.'"
70% - out of every X lines of code, 70% of them are actually executed in test. For example, code might contain something like:
if (month == 12 && day == 25) {
printf("Joyous Season of Light\n");
}
However, without cheating, this holiday greeting would be untested on most testing days.
CCN - a way of expressing the logical complexity of program code to flag potential trouble spots. Google Cyclomatic Complexity
pre-sprint grooming - google agile development.
[imho]
Coverage is a good thing, although 70 seems pretty lowball.
CCN is well dressed snake oil; however it has a more interesting side effect - low CC# programs are often easier to read.
Agile is unpretentious snake oil.