Recoding pros and cons (was: RE: [thelist] RE: PHP 'proof of conc ept' virus developed)

martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com
Thu Jan 11 05:40:35 CST 2001


Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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"Plan to throw one away. You will anyway" - Fred Brooks.

If you're doing IT Project Management, you *will* need to read
"The Mythical Man Month".

Cheers
Martin






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Subject:  Recoding pros and cons (was: RE: [thelist] RE: PHP 'proof of conc ept'
      virus developed)



While David's comment has a lot of truth, it's not always detrimental to
code in a way that encourages rewriting.

Well, that's a controversial statement, but I think I can back it up! Of
course project planning is a "Good Thing(tm)", but it's not always possible
to plan in such a way that perfect code will be written from the word go. I
remember reading about a study that looked into a way of coding that
encouraged programmers to code a solution to a problem and then throw it
away and recode for inclusion in a finished application. (Unfortunately I
have no supporting links for this).

They found that as long as this was planned into the project from the
beginning, it led to better code quality at the cost of a slightly increased
development cycle. The development time was only slightly increased because
time was saved from the end of the project in reduced bug chasing.



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