Bad Code Costing Oracle Millions
That’s what Mary Ann Davidson, chief security officer at Oracle said according to this InfoWorld article.
Her first response to the Oracle database being “unbreakable” was “What idiot dreamed this up?”. She also said that if civil engineers built bridges in the same fashion in which software developers write code, people would face the “blue bridge of death” every morning going to work.
So, there you go. Blame it all on software developers. Yes, I’m a software developer and yes I do turn a blind eye to good coding practices but only when I have to code “the quick and dirty” way because of tight deadlines that the business need imposes on me.
Given enough time and enough knowledge and experience, software developers can do miracles, don’t you think?
Related articles:
- Control When Oracle SQL Developer Completes Your Code
- The Case of Better Readable Code
- Self Documenting Code is Not Enough
Good software developers make good code in good time. Extraordinary Software developers make excellent code even in bad timing. Greetings Karl PS.: i never let quality fall down even the time was running. At the end i was always faster as the guys from the quick and dirty community.
So what i want to say is good code is not a question of timing at first. The coding mind is the biggest factor for coding quality. Karl
You can get it done cheap, fast, correctly. Pick 2.
Guess which two are usually selected? Oracle is no different than anyone else.
Good points Karl.
Consider this scenario: You are given a task to code a business rule or logic in, let’s say, PL/SQL. Your manager wants this task done in one hour, no questions asked.
You know that in order to do it right, you need at least 2 hours because you want to follow PL/SQL best practices, like writing reusable pieces of code, writing unit tests…
You also know that you can make it in one hour if you do not follow all the PL/SQL best practices (which I refer to as “quick and dirty”).
What will you do? What will you tell your manager?
I agree with Steve Feuerstein:
We all want to write better, more efficient, and more easily maintainable code. The challenge is figuring out how to do this while still meeting our deadlines (and finding time to spend with our families).
On a related note, here is a good article to read: Why we all sell code with bugs
No manager in their right mind would put that type of constraint on a business critical piece of coding, if you only have been given 1 hour to fix a 1+X hour problem, then the problem needs more discussion and a proper plan needs to be put in place to fix it.
If the constraint still exists, make sure the managers manager is well aware of that and wait for the pain and suffering of training a new manager, because the one making demands like that is not in the best interest of the company to keep around. Hopefully somebody with more brains farther up the chain of command will recognize that.
A company doesn’t continue to exist by setting its employees up to fail.
If somebody wants to have the work done in one week and i really estimate 2 weeks i would contact him telling why i would need more time.
Karl
if you only have been given 1 hour to fix a 1+X hour problem
My point was that you could fix it in one hour (or one week or one month), but the “X” is for writing reusable pieces of code, unit tests, documentation… Your manager has to believe in following best practices and standards when writing code, otherwise it will be hard to convince him/her that you need “extra” time to write better code.
Speaking of managers, here are a couple of articles I found interesting:
How NOT to lead geeks
Top Management Lies
Hi again, an important role between mangament and the coder ist the project leader. He has to load balance/filter the demands of business with resources available in the dev team. Greetings Karl