Sunday, November 27, 2005

Code Never Written?

"Code Never Written" is a mindset. It stems from an off-the-cuff "rule" I first spouted all too long ago:

Code never written never needs maintenance.

Of course, code never written never needs
  • the approval of the architectural oversight committee
  • design artifacts
  • peer code review
  • security review
  • functional testing
  • debugging
  • performance testing
  • optimization
  • documentation
  • user education
  • patching
  • or retirement.

Not to mention the grief it can bring to the author and the hapless victims of his code. You can see what an advantage it is not to code something, if that's a viable option.

"Code Never Written" is not a design methodology. It's perfectly acceptable to find in your effort to produce a useful or even saleable body of software that some code must be written. There's no shame in that.