Good Code Is Balanced

2012-08-27

In my first post about what constitutes “good code,” I claimed we were dealing with a complex question. This is why I distrust short answers.

So many competing concerns must be balanced to achieve goodness:

Testability
Maintainability
Short-term revenue pressures
Long-term strategic value
Performance (many aspects)
Scalability (up, down, across)
Ease of use
Supportability
Conceptual integrity
Alignment with the skills, temperament, interests, and tools of the team that owns it
Cost vs. benefit (for some problems, quick and dirty is definitely "right")
Simplicity (separation of concerns)

More items undoubtedly belong on the list. Quite a balancing act!

Action Item

Pick a module, application, or subsystem that you know well, and grade its code according to how much its coders emphasize a few different dimensions (e.g., performance, testability, scalability, ease of use). Do you like the balance? Are any attributes being neglected?

Comments

Metrics, Plumb Lines, and System Thinking « Codecraft, 2012-11-12:

[...] I’m also a big believer in balance, as I’ve written about before. Good software balances many considerations. [...]
3 Commandments of Performance Optimization « Codecraft, 2013-01-08:

[...] On the other hand, it is possible to be too passionate about performance; optimizing the performance of the dev team (by decreasing coding and testing time) is often a better business choice than optimizing execution speed in ways that make code more complex and harder to verify. I have encountered performance zealots disqualifying a perfectly good design on the grounds that it’s not performant enough in a use case that only 2 customers on the entire planet would ever care about. Not smart. As I’ve said many times, good code is balanced. [...]
Earned Pragmatism « Codecraft, 2013-01-18:

[...] you can be a pragmatist, you have to understand what’s possible, what’s good and bad about each alternative, and why certain considerations might trump others given a certain business context and time [...]
Smart Geeks Think Like Cheerleaders « Codecraft, 2013-02-05:

[...] We champion the ideal implementation, programming language, product schedule, or architecture—so much so that we lose momentum or balance. [...]