Re:Does poor coding ever sink a startup?
by cmorgan8506 on Thursday November 08, 2012 @09:32AM
(#4757898)
Do you think "over-engineering" could be a contributor to an unmaintainable code base? Also, do you think TDD is key to faster/cleaner iterations?
Re:Does poor coding ever sink a startup?
by calbear98 on Thursday November 08, 2012 @05:54PM
(#4760331)
Yes, absolutely. I had an experience where the design was dictated by an architect who cared more about the theoretical and having UML diagrams looking nice than about actual business requirements and having the code be lean, clean, simple and efficient.
TDD and also code analysis tools can help highlight what you actually need and what you don't.
The converse is true too, if you under-engineer you run the risk of not easily being able to scale up to new requirements.
Over-engineering creates an albatross where you'll fall under your own weight (too much code, slows down development, possibly bad performance, harder to debug). Under-engineering creates a house of cards that is fragile (more buggy, code gets duplicated and patched on, frustrating to work on, hard to refactor).
Outsourcing, high turnover, constantly changing requirements with unreasonable schedules all can lead to codebases that become too expensive to iterate on when the market demands more. Sometimes the only way out is to approach a complete rewrite which is usually a risky proposition.
Many times poorly coded products from the outside can have correlated symptoms of poor performance, bugginess, and slow feature development which are the cited reasons users may abandon the product.