Our team met yesterday to do a walk-through on a project that was developed by a group of contractors for a high-priority project. A significant portion of the project architecture relied on patterns like dependency injection, factories, and the like to gain a high degree of loose coupling. This was motivated by the ever changing requirements for the product owner and the demands that the system be easily extensible.
At various points during the review, some of the team members that had the longest time on the team made comments that the design was too abstract, that “we’d never do a system this way.” When we came across a set of tests that had been commented out, the response was, “Good, we didn’t want to maintain tests anyway.”
Being the new guy on the team, I wanted to understand why they felt that way. The general opinion of the team was that abstraction and unit tests were simply too time consuming to implement and yielded too little value to consider for their applications. This position intrigued me – considering how much adoption and support Agile practices for software engineering have across the industry.
I believe this opinion is rooted in the business’s belief that “better is the enemy of ‘good enough’”. They are more interested in getting applications out quickly, with as few bugs as possible, but when bugs do occur, they are VERY tolerant of them. The cost associated with fixing the bugs, even if they are found in the field by end users, is not seen as a significant reason for being more strict in the development methodologies to prevent them.
Instead, they rely heavily on business analysts acting as QA and end users to ferret out the defects that are most critical and fix them then and there. More esoteric bugs that don’t dramatically affect the usability of the applications are glossed over and may be fixed in the future when time allows (or may not).
All of this is motivated by the belief that “going fast is the single most important requirement for our development teams.”
Velocity is King here – and it’s good to be the King.
