Consequences of doing "good enough" software

Question

Does doing "good enough" software take anything from you being a programmer?

Here are my thoughts on this:

Well Joel Spolsky from JoelOnSoftware says that programmers gets bored because they do "good enough" (software that satisfies the requirements even though they are not that optimized). I agree, because people like to do things that are right all the way. On one side of the spectra, I want to go as far as:

1. Optimizing software in such a way as I can apply all my knowledge in Math and Computer Science I acquired in college as much as possible.
2. Do all of the possible software development process say: get specs from a repository, generate the code, build, test, deploy complete with manuals in a single automated build step.

On the other hand, a trait to us human is that we like variety. In order to us to maintain attraction (love programming), we need to jump from one project or technology to the other in order for us to not get bored and have "fun".

I would like your opinion if there is any good or bad side effects in doing "good enough" software to you as a programmer or human being?

Answer 1

I actually consider good-enough programmers to be better than the blue-sky-make-sure-everything-is-perfect variety.

That's because, although I'm a coder, I'm also a businessman and realize that programs are not for the satisfaction of programmers, they're to meet a specific business need.

I actually had an argument in another question regarding the best way to detect a won tic-tac-toe/noughts-and-crosses game (an interview question).

The best solution that I'd received was from a candidate that simply checked all 8 possibilities with if statements. There were some that gave a generalized solution which, while workable, were totally unnecessary since the specs were quite clear it was for a 3x3 board only.

Many people thought I was being too restrictive and the "winning" solution was rubbish but my opinion is that it's not the job of a programmer to write perfect beautifully-extendable software. It's their job to meet a business need.

If that business need allows them the freedom to do more than necessary, that's fine, but most software and fixes are delivered under time and cost constraints. Programmers (or any profession) don't work in a vacuum.

Answer 2

As a programmer I want to write excellent software that's defect-free. I'm not particularly interested in gold-plating, the act of adding unnecessary features that "improve" the software, though we all do it to a certain extent. In that sense, I'm satisfied with "good enough" software, if by good enough you mean that I've done what the customer asked and, at the same time, crafted it well and ensured that it is high quality.

What bothers me is when I take short-cuts and write crappy, untested code. I hate writing code that is buggy or where I've failed to refactor it into a better design as I've gone along. when I let a lot of technical debt creep in -- getting too busy writing new features instead of consistently improving old features as I'm adding new ones -- then I know that eventually I'll have something that, while the customer may be happy with it, I won't be.

Fortunately, in my workplace, management knows the value of keeping the code clean and I know the value of not obsessing over the elusive goal of perfection. No code is ever perfect, but "good enough" has to mean that the code is well-crafted. I've learned, and am still learning, to be happy with code that meets the customer's requirements and that the best feature is the one that doesn't need to be implemented. Fortunately, I have enough work to do that dropping features because they're not needed is a good thing.

Answer 3

In my experience, "good enough" always includes hacks, sloppiness, bad commenting, and spaghetti hell, thus leads to lack of scalability, bugs, lagginess, and prevents others from being able to build effectively on your work.

Pax, while I recognize your points about business needs and pragmatism, doing things "by the book" is for the business side. "Good enough for now" and "just get something working right quick" always leads to far more work-hours later on fixing everything, or downright redoing it when it comes to that, than would be spent doing it right the first time. "The book" was written for a reason.