Last week I gave my first ?Practices
of an Agile Developer? talk. We had a room full of audience and nice
interaction. One of the practices focused on why we should not leave a developer (and
code) in
isolation. Another practice centered on writing code incrementally, following a series
of edit?test cycles. I
mentioned about a developer who was coding for 30 minutes before bothering to compile
and ended up
with thousands of errors and unmaintainable code.
After the talk, one of the attendees mentioned he relates to that example very well.
He worked for a
company where a developer had coded for 3 months without bothering to test or even
run the code.
Apparently the language used placed constraints on number of characters on a line
and the developer
had consistently violated. They finally discovered the code that was FUBARed (Fouled
Up Beyond All Repair!).
This is an extreme case of isolation. I asked what they did with this hapless code
in this hopeless situation.
Well, he said, they threw out?the code and the developer?and started over.
