Think before you code (2007)

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-06-21-think-before-coding.html

by s-phi-nl • 16 years ago

20 10 16 years ago

daemonology.net

gfodor• 16 years ago

Great post, resonates with my reply here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334915

lsb2• 16 years ago

There was some Mixergy interview where the guy at IMVU or somewhere was saying that it was trendy to measure progress the Agile way, by lines of code written, whereas it was more accurate a metric to measure progress by learning.

dmoney• 16 years ago

I used to work at a company where they did Scrum. We never measured progress by lines of code. The way they measured progress was:

1. Start with "User Stories", or things you want the software to do for your users.

2. Assign each story a difficulty ("Story Points").

3. Work in iterations ("Sprints") of two weeks or so.

4. Your total accomplishment is the Story Points of the User Stories you complete, and your productivity ("Velocity") is story points completed per sprint.

I didn't think this was a good system, as difficulty varies with experience and tools, and so if you're more productive new stories will be assigned smaller story point values. So you're really only measuring how hard you work, rather than the value you create.

Maybe they use lines of code in other forms of agile.

derefr• 16 years ago

I think a decent analogue of "lines of code written" would be "number of public methods with unit tests" (i.e. the size of your stable API.)

weixiyen• 16 years ago

How do you know when to stop thinking though?

pmccool• 16 years ago

Personally, when I start going round in circles that's a hint to start coding. Also, if I start speculating about performance, I like to get some actual measurements, which means writing code.

jgg• 16 years ago

This is why I love Haskell. Dealing with the type system and purely functional style forces you to think about the problem at hand before you do anything.

lsb2• 16 years ago

Haskell's type system is both expressive and flexible enough to allow most of the benefits of polymorphism, via type classes, while being rigid enough to both catch coarse-grained logic errors and enable efficient compilation. And the syntax is gorgeous! I only sketch type signatures out in Haskell syntax.

cema• 16 years ago

Yes. Also while and after.

badave• 16 years ago

Depends on what you are coding. Sometimes when I'm coding for fun I don't want to think.

Think before you code (2007)

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