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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Real World Software Engineering – XXIII

On the intuition of risk of throw-away code

At times, while I'm creating software, I have a feeling (and it is just a feeling) that what I'm creating is going to the garbage. Being subjective, there is no way at the time to be sure if the preoccupation is warranted or not. I think that this feeling arises out of different factors:

- knowing that you are coding something for a requirement that brings little value to the end user. Apparently the business thought about the requirement, but you are not convinced.
- knowing that you are coding something for a requirement that is not firm in consensus.
- knowing that you are coding something for a requirement that is not well understood by the client. (The client may 'know' the requirement but not 'master' it. When that happens there's risk in the requirement.)
- knowing that you are introducing dependencies into other software that were not debated in the group/project.
- knowing that you are coding something for a requirement which is not explicit, that you think you are going to need but you are not so sure. That is, if you do not code it, there's the risk that there will be a 'bug' created saying that your feature is not complete.

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