I’ve been with my current company for over two months now, so I’m fully ramped up and integrated with my new team. Since I arrived, we’ve hired one more developer and a tester to round out the team. Last week we finalized some plans to prepare the application for an huge influx of new features. The application does about 1/5 of what it needs to do long-term, so we need to be able to add these new features quickly now that we have formed a complete team. My challenge was to find a way to facilitate that.
The hump to get over was some of the assumptions that the current application made (and were perfectly valid at the time). The business had changed direction, but the software hadn’t. Consequently, new features had to work around the (now false) assumptions. Adding features became slow, and debugging even slower.
The solution: rematch the software with the business. Another way to put it would be that the application was full, and we need to make room in the codebase for new features. This means a lot of new code. It might sound alarming at first, but typing the codes isn’t what takes so long. What takes so long is hashing out the design. Yes, the code IS the design, and the code is what is important, but I would argue that the code is a mere textual representation of the design. You can’t have code without design. Typing characters in the IDE is very fast when the design is known (because one can see the text in one’s head before typing the words). The design has been hashed, changed, and rehashed over time. It’s been refined and tested, so now that it is known, the code representing it can by typed very quickly in a manner that leaves ample room (i.e. loosely-coupled) for new features and changes down the road.
We can’t throw away code! We spent a lot of money on that code!!!
The above statement is a fallacy. The company spent money designing, not typing. The level of communication required with business partners was the majority of the costs. Technical design and whiteboarding is some cost. The typing was cheap!