What Is Good Software?

I dropped out of graduate school at MIT to launch an Internet startup in the earliest days of the Web. At that time, building a website was difficult. This was before technologies such as Active Server Pages or ASP.NET existed. (We had only stone knives.) Saving the contents of an HTML form to a database table was a major accomplishment. Blinking text was the height of cool.

When I first started writing software, simply getting the software to do what I wanted was the goal. Adding as many features to a website in the shortest amount of time was the key to survival in the ferociously competitive startup world of the ’90s. I used to sleep in my office under my desk.

During my startup phase, I would define good software like this:

Good software is software that works as you intended.

If I was feeling particularly ambitious, I would worry about performance. And maybe, just maybe, if I had extra time, I would add a comment or two to my code. But really, at the end of the day, my criterion for success was simply that the software worked.

For the past 8 years, I’ve provided training and consulting to large companies and organizations such as Boeing, NASA, Lockheed Martin, and the National Science Foundation. Large organizations are not startups. In a large organization, the focus is not on building software applications as fast as possible; the focus is on building software applications that can be easily maintained over time.

Over the years, my definition of good software has shifted substantially. As I have been faced with the scary prospect of maintaining my own monsters, I’ve changed my definition of good software to this:

Good software is software that works as you intended and that is easy to change.

There are many reasons that software changes over time. Michael Feathers, in his excellent book Working Effectively with Legacy Code, offers the following reasons:

1. You might need to add a new feature to existing software.
2. You might need to fix a bug in existing software.
3. You might need to optimize existing software.
4. You might need to improve the design of existing software.

For example, you might need to add a new feature to an application. The call manager application started as a Single Button Application. However, each day, more and more features were added to the application.

You also need to change software when you discover a bug in the software. For instance, in the case of the call manager, we discovered that it did not calculate daylight savings time correctly. (It was waking some people up in the morning!) We rushed to change the broken code.

You also might need to modify a software application to make the application run faster. At one point, the call manager application took as long as 12 seconds to dial a new phone number. The business rules were getting complex. We had to rewrite the code to get the phone number retrieval time down to the millisecond range. Finally, you might need to modify software to improve its design. In other words, you might need to take badly written code and convert it into good code. You might need to make your code more resilient to change.


Source of Information : Sams ASP .NET MVC Framework Unleashed

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