Where is the Quality?

I am professional Java developer since almost 14 years. I have been coding for education, fun and profit for 27 years and three months now. I bought my first book on how to program BASIC for the in 1986, even before I got the computer itself. I have been enthusiastic about all this since then and never stopped pushing forward. But I am depressed. Maybe I get depressed easily, as once after a I had to take an antidepressant for more than a year. Fortunately no burn-out this time - I am just fed up. Time for a rant ;-)



The current state of the IT industry makes me unhappy. That is and maybe my last is a particular bad example, but I do not think so. I have been with some companies during my career and talked to developers working on different projects, and usually I hear the same story: Deadline first, crazy rush, get the shit out of the door, repeat. I am the , I try to keep things together, clean them up, whip them into shape. But I am wasting my time. My work has no meaning. I am just one but "they" are legion. Recently when being confronted with bad code. How do you dare to deliver such crap to my production code base. This is all a big joke.




Some developers have no idea about object orientation, encapsulation or how to design a class at all. The senior developers know their business and applications well, still some of them are unable to create a reasonable design or model classes with a single responsibility. This does not only apply to off-shoring, but to local teams as well. Managers and architects are talking about all aspects of the development cycle BUT the actual creation of the core asset, the executable code. Development of code is seen as a commodity, unimportant work, just fill in the gaps.



DARK FUTURE

Last month I was invited to a small panel discussion. Together with a test automation expert and an user interface specialist, we were discussing with the audience about the future of software development. The opening question was for our advice for students of higher technical education. Where the testing and user interface people predict a bright future, I have a . I would not advise anybody who is passionate to start working in today's mainstream IT industry. Software is growing more and more complex and changing it takes longer and longer. At the same time the cost pressure increases. Current trends like Water-Scrum-Fall try to fix these problems with a process. The real issue is the bad quality of our code. We have accumulated a massive amount of . The same is true for testing. Yes, we plan for unit tests during development, but then need to finish the requirement first and skip the tests. In the end we get some UI test automation, delivered by an outsourced testing team. Hello .



ESCAPE?

I get many looking for Java developers. But their work is as broken as ours. I am sure, if they would just read one post of they would not send me information about an open position for a junior developer who is supposed to add buttons to a web application. Some head hunters are even specialized in IT personnel but seem to be as (un-)skilled in their work as most of us. From my experience they just do not care, else they would not send me letters with a wrong name in the salutation. Anyway, all advertisements for job vacancies I have seen so far were flat and did not say anything about what to expect. I am not excited.



I believe that the Software Craftsmanship movement was born to address these issues. But Austria is a small country and I am not aware that there are companies like around. Still I know of many passionate developers and would like to hear about companies, where all members of the development team are craftsmen. It will definitely be a small company, at least a small development team hiding somewhere. SO PLEASE STOP HIDING AND COME OUTSIDE, I AM LOOKING FOR YOU! (I really hope you exist ;-)
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