Lack of Technical Management

I worked on many projects and found a repeating anti-pattern that is happening to the codebase, which is the lack of technical management. Here, I am sharing my thoughts about it.

The problem definition:

• The team has no understanding of the size of the product and its complexity.
• There is a lack of metrics and understanding of source code quality, that includes the source code itself as well as its design and architecture.
• There are no defined coding standards, as well as design and architectural standards.
• Lack of metrics regarding automated testing and code coverage. Sometimes, there is a complete lack of test strategy.
• No measures to the amount of codebase changes and how the codebase is affected.
• No statistical understanding to the quality of the product from customer’s perspectives, e.g. bugs.

In general we need to know the baseline now, as well as, on weekly basis how the codebase is changing overtime. For example, is code quality deteriorating or improving? Is complexity increasing? At what pace? What about code modifiability?

In general I understand why project management is done properly, most of the time. Usually, because of the customer pushing to get things done, and our understanding that, if we are not able to satisfy our customers, our competitors will. But, what if you mismanage the product technically and focused solely on feature delivery? In the short term, no one will notice, but as time passes, here is what happens all the time.

1. The code base becomes harder and harder to understand.
2. Code modifications becomes time consuming.
3. Regression bugs increase.
4. The fear of changing code increases rapidly. Copy/paste strategies flourish and lead to a larger codebase and a lot of duplicate code. And, then new inconsistency bugs appear.
5. Codebase hate becomes widespread. Everyone is cursing the product and nagging to start something cleaner and better structured. Sometimes to use new frameworks or even a new language altogether. Guess what, we start a green field project, and once the codebase grows, and with the continual of “lack of disciplined technical management”, the whole cycle repeats. Just go up to item number one and read again.

I will share how to resolve this in upcoming posts.