I think we actually agree - the trade off should be that optimal zone of optimal
possible quality for most efficient development time. Then we load up the testing
phase (which has to be done anyway) and rely on it to provide the important bugs
that need fixing. And since the prog’s have rushed through dev they might feel
more inclined to test properly - who knows!

I wrote about it on codemonkey in an article that expands the idea here:

We are ALL NUBS!

Regards,
AdamR

I guess I’m talking about an ideal situation … but it takes discipline in and of ourselves to work within whatever boundaries we find ourselves in. You can code lazy whether you own your own business or work in a corporate environment. Conversely, the opposite is true. You can code awesome whereever you are, to a certain extent.

Anyway, I very much appreciate the discussions … heh heh.

For the overworked I currently take the attitude of building something
quickly that just works, then if it is used to build it up, thus minimising
wasted time.

Now if you know ahead of time that you are building the next MYOB,
sure you might want to make your code extensible and modular, and
add comments and documentation and add good generic error handling
and so forth. But the point is these things come with experience and
you should already be coding without much slow down.

The part of the dev. cycle I find more important to take time over,
particularly for the less endowed, is design. A bad coder who just
jumps in is guarnteed to write absolute crap. And by saying take
time over design - I mean actually just have an analysis and design
phase! I don’t mean waste any time…

We have these arguements all the time over at;
RogueLike Dev usegroup
and it is usually the newer inexperienced programmers who advocate either;

A) Taking time on each step.
B) Jumping right in with no design.

Perhaps there is a nice middle ground that keeps productivity high
and quality acceptable, like most things in computers - a trade off.

/message ends!

I used to belive this - but after watching BS’s proflic work rate
I’m not convinced - seems like an attitude that suits MS dev
tools to cover for their tortoiseness!

Regards,
AdamR

QUOTEOFTHEDAY: “Work well, then hard.”