Re: [OT] Programming practice question

On Tuesday, August 13, 2002, at 12:03  pm, Philip Mak wrote:

> Suppose you're programming some system. You have to reach a milestone
> tomorrow.
>
> Your code is kind of messy right now. You can reach the milestone on
> time if you write more messy code.
>
> But you'd save time in the long run if you stepped back, reviewed your
> code, and reorganized it in a cleaner fashion first. But you don't
> have time to do that now, due to tomorrow's deadline.
>
> What do you do?

Personally I would get to the deadline writing one more days worth of 
untidy
code - because lets face it, if it's that bad, that it can not be 
rectified in one day,
another day is not going to make any difference.

I would then do a code review after the said milestone and isolate the 
main
areas that are of 'issue' and then concentrate on refactoring the code 
so as to
improve it. As is the nature with refactoring, things should cascade 
until you
reach a point where you either have to stop - in which case the code 
should
be even slightly better, or because the job is complete in which case 
the code
is better. If this is done in parallel [ie. with a view of the planned 
future
development of the code] then you should not loose too much time and
would be in line for a better engineered product.  Although having said 
that,
it's also important that you apply the correct refactorings.

Another point to consider is this: does the system have to be maintained 
or
is the code being developed for a one off tool to solve a one off 
problem? If
it is, then I do not [personally] feel that a beautifully engineered 
code base
and solution is necessary - yes it is good practice, but really when 
push comes
to shove - you are up against a deadline and deadlines are hard to keep 
at
the best of times without adding to the work. |f it isn't then it is 
definatly
important to make sure that things are maintainable.

But, this is all my initial thoughts on the question,

Regards,

Chris