Which curve do you choose?

Important code should be tiny, beautiful, and in control. Anything else is a waste of money. To me it's so obvious and internalized that I forget that not everybody sees it like this. It's hard to have a quality discussion with someone if your opinions differ greatly as you will both be puzzled and then – nothing. It recently occurred to me that many people automatically agree that bad software quality is expensive, but don't really believe it deep down.

Let's have a look at two realities (curves) that we can choose between. To many it's a law of nature that it becomes extremely costly to make changes in software. They think that software must rotten over time and it happens pretty fast.

Boehm's curve (from the book Software Engineering Economics) indicates that the cost of correcting an error will increase exponentially over time in a project. I guess it's possible to understand it so that costs will continue to increase after the first version is in production, leading to changes becoming more and more expensive. This means that all decisions must be taken very early in the life cycle so as to not cost a crazy amount.

Of course it doesn’t have to be like this. Beck's curve (from the book Extreme Programming Explained) indicates another way it can be; instead of the cost growing exponentially, it will level out.

This is where how beautiful the code is, how large it is and if it is in control comes in. To create the second curve, there are very high requirements for the state of the software and how it is continuously cleaned up, how it is redesigned, and if it has good automatic tests and automatic deployment, and so on. A combination of many well executed actions will lead to the software being changeable. The value of this for the business is, of course, potentially great.

Maybe the two different beliefs are the reason behind stupid decisions you see being made. But when you have realized that there might be the differences in basic beliefs, it's suddenly not so strange anymore. That's not to say that you necessarily agree with the decisions, but when you understand where the other person is coming from, at least it's possible to understand why the choice was made.

By the way, if you think that you and your organization are careful when you develop, but you still arrive at the first curve, then unfortunately it's probably the case that the code isn't all that great after all.

To summarize: if the software is changeable without incurring dramatic costs even late in the life cycle, it will change everything in the software development thinking.

Unfortunately there's a catch. The "flat" curve is way harder to achieve. It's possible, yes, but not something to take lightly. Anyway, it starts with a choice and I will return to how it can be achieved in an upcoming chronicle.

Have you decided which curve you would like?

(First published in Swedish as a developer chronicle here.)