Compromises on Quality

Management often says this but really mean “I look to my developers to tell me what critical things must be there in order for the business to derive benefit.” If we are being asked to deliver something with such low quality that the customer or the team will pay for it later then we must help management understand the cost of their decisions.

We are not looking for perfect code. Building software is a series of compromises and the developers who are writing it are the best informed to make the wisest decisions on which compromises to make.

We all want to be proud of our work but we also realize that being a perfectionist is often not desirable and we must find a middle ground. Sometimes we have to ship code with serious flaws but we should be aware when we do and make a case for cleaning it up later as good for the business’s ongoing investment in their software assets.