Friday, January 30, 2009

Craftmanship over Crap

Uncle Bob makes a compelling case for adding one more value to the Agile Manifesto, initially and for effect it was "Craftmanship over Crap" he later changed it to the less dramatic "Craftmanship over Execution" and asked others if they could find an even better phrasing and many good points were raised, for the full story look here. I've been mulling over this a bit, looking at the proposals and in the meantime hoping that my green wristband will guide me, but then it struck me. The original formulation is from a clean code perspective absolutley perfect, with one minor detail. It's not Crap the word, it's CRAP the acronym, and that's a honest misstake. Let's look a bit closer CRAP is Coupled Redundant Arbitrary Duplication and in essence that's exectly the anti-thesis of clean code. The marvelous thing about it is that even the acronym in itself exhibits a distinctly CRAP quality. Coupled because it doesn't make sense without the other parts. Redundant because it duplicates what crap is. Arbitrary since it could be something else. Duplication is redundant.

No comments:

Post a Comment