Re: Coding goals / requirements.

Hi Brane,

I'm pretty sure the context of the quote is along the lines of;

Poor design and implementation proves to be a burden in terms of maintenance costs, in the long run.
And instead of having bums on seats for (entirely) new development, manpower is, instead, wasted on maintenance tasks because of poor design / lack of a prototype etc.

I guess it is an implementation / coding practice question;
Would a developer's time not be better spent on;
Doing the "guts"of the job and at a later stage once the engineering is proven to be accurate / reflective of the requirements - then worry about private / public API requirements.

Especially in an OSS project where resources are lean and transient, it is "my" (perhaps naive) view that spending x hours on writing an API that might not ever be used by another consumer is in fact x hours wasted that could have been spent on a more worthwhile task.
When the requirement of a service to be consumed comes to bear, that is the time to create an appropriate API.

From my past experiences, I have created many an API that have never-ever been used, purely because the design standard said an API was required, though the engineering requirements of satisfying the task at hand negated that requirement entirely.

Again - I don't presume to know any better - and in fact I started the thread because of a desire to hopefully learn from it,
I'm not trying to be deliberately argumentative - I am just a proponent of a good debate that fleshes out better outcomes / knowledge - selfishly for myself - and hopefully for others too.

Gavin.

On 18/01/2011, at 9:13 AM, Branko Čibej wrote:

> On 17.01.2011 23:07, Gavin Beau Baumanis wrote:
>> Hi Brane,
>> I certainly do take maintainability seriously.
>> What's that well-quoted figure?
>> Something like 80% of the cost of software development is spent in the development phase?
>
> I believe it's "should be spent" rather than "is spent" ... in reality,
> I've yet to see a project that didn't incur horrendous maintenance costs
> as a result of shortcuts taken during development.
>
> -- Brane
>
Received on 2011-01-18 02:57:11 CET