A very important eye-opening non-technical thought for technical guys!
As I mentioned, I am not going to talk about any technical things here. This article is more about discussing the consequences of writing bad code for an application and why such things take place.
First thing first, A small mistake in code can make a huge cost to a business so it is very important that we understand our responsibilities while writing code and be more focused and thoughtful during our day to day coding.
At the initial stage of our technical career we consider coding just as our high school or college project but in reality it decides the fortune or may be a life changing for someone and we realize that may be after many years or never! :)
I know a western company which had a killer idea of providing a software as a service. It was popular, well managed and everything was going fine. But after the first release, suddenly the next release cycles began to stretch. Customers started complaining. Number of app crashes increased. Few group of people sue the product to court and consumer forums for certain loss. At then end the founder shut the product down in frustration and the business went out in a short period. A beautiful and powerful idea meets a dead end!
So what was the major cause of that western company's failure? The management? investors? customers? marketing? product user experience or user interface?, features? NO! The reason behind the failure of the whole company was, Bad code! They were in a rush to release the new features and made a huge mess in code. They tried to add more and more code and features and the code got worse and worse day by day and simply could not manage it longer! So it was the bad code that brought the company down!
So what is the general scenario where a well managed code turns into a bad code? Here I am trying to summarize it:
Are you trying to go fast?
Are you in a rush to release?
Are you feeling that you have no time to do a good job?
Are you facing a fear that your boss will be angry at you if you take time to clean up the code?
Perhaps you are just tired of working on this project and wanted to be over? (This is a major reason many times!)
Maybe you looked at the backlog of other stuff that you have promised to get done and realized that you need more time.
You know what, we all have faced similar issues in the past and most of the time we end up with big mess but we keep the mess as it is because we all felt the relief of seeing our messy program work. We decide to keep this working mess instead of nothing. We also decided to clean it up later on. But actually that "later equals never" in this case.
I am sure you can align yourself with the scenarios mentioned above and created many code messes which you recollect now :) . In my upcoming article we will discuss the cost of this mess and how can we make our code clean!
Keep reading and following for many new articles!
I can relate. I have had such experience myself while writing code. Really good article!