Clean Code, bullshit or common sense?

Common story

Bob started to work at a new company. Soon he realized his new job would have a lot to do with a very old and complex legacy system. It was an anemic code without tests. There was neither any documentation. No explanations about underlying workflows which should represent the decisions made to solve business requirements which someday were asked by some stakeholder, then added to the backlog, implemented and delivered. However, that stakeholder wasn’t in the company anymore as well as the first developers.

Why does it happen so commonly?

Let’s start clarifying something: please, don’t get me wrong! I don’t want to say simply the code is a $#@& and to blame developers or companies, because it won’t lead us to anything. That is true, we do have a lot of unprofessional developers, but just blaming isn’t the point and we have to consider a broader scenario to get deeper.

What is the point then?

I haven’t brought you here to give an easy-solution-answer, because it simply doesn’t exist.

What does my experience say?

I do have a real case where we’ve spent more time in the beginning to achieve well parity dev-prod environments, completely isolated database for each running instance of the project, end-to-end tests for the whole application, feature and unit tests for each codebase, automated deployment, hexagonal architecture… well… a lot of themes which are unreachable and philosophical for many out there… just bullshit for them…

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Clean Coder and TDD evangelist delivering software ASAP (as simple as possible)

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Felipe Martins

Clean Coder and TDD evangelist delivering software ASAP (as simple as possible)