Talking CRAP with Joel Spolsky and Eric Sink
Yesterday (October 29th) I gave my talk on crappy code at “The Business of Software” conference. Given the line up of other prestigious (and professional) speakers, the pressure was on but, apparently, the talk went quite well. Here’s what Bob Cramblitt had to say about it:
A Man Who Knows His Crap
Alberto Savoia of Agitar Software (www.agitar.com) knows crappy software, in every permutation. More than talking about it, his company is eradicating crappy software through better testing. Business of Software 2007 attendees were treated to a hilarious treatise on crappy software from Savoia. Those who experienced Alberto live won’t forget him anytime soon. For the rest of you, there’s the interview on this blog: http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2007/09/alberto-savoia-.html
The talk was recorded on video-tape and I’ll try to get it posted on YouTube or on the crap4j.org website sometime soon.
After all the talks:
At the post-conference reception I had the opportunity to meet and talk CRAP with a bunch of interesting people. I met Scott Farquhar, one of the co-founders of Atlassian (a very cool and successful company doing work in software metrics) - it would be great to see the CRAP metric show up in their product.
At the end of the evening, I went to a (late) dinner with some of the other speakers and had an opportunity to meet spend some quality time talking about CRAP with Joel Spolsky and Eric Sink. After a full day of talking about software, I was actually more interested in talking to Joel about his cross-country bike trip, something I’d love to do myself one of these days. However, we ended up talking about the CRAP metric.
Joel is not a big fan of software metrics in general. He is concerned that developers might end up writing code and allocating their time to satisfy a specific metric rather than writing the best possible code and allocating the time based on more important criteria. He narrated a couple of stories about horrific metrics misuse that he witnessed first-hand and was concerned that - in the wrong hands - the CRAP metric could be used in, say, performance reviews: “You code is too crappy. You’re fired!”.
I understand that there is potential, as well as evidence, for software metrics misuse; but I don’t think that’s sufficient reason for avoiding metrics altogether. My reply to Joel was that if an organization/manager is so lazy and stupid to rely exclusively on any given code metric in evaluating programmers, then those programmers are probably better off being fired from that organization anyway. Better yet, the programmers would have great evidence to have the moronic manager fired.
While I understand that any tool, technology, or information can be abused by “evil” people and misused by stupid ones, I don’t think we should use “How could this be abused or misused?” as the primary criteria - at least not without first balancing the potential benefits.
Toward the end of the conversation, Eric Sink observed that the argument was starting to sound a lot like the perennial “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” discussion. Great observation Eric.
On a more positive note, Joel did think that the CRAP metric could be useful when applied to existing code (i.e. post-facto) and said he might experiment with it.
I am not taking Joel’s concerns lightly; I respect his opinion and experience and I know that there are other people that feel as strongly as he does about software metrics. He has definitely given me something to think about - and blog about.
I met and talked with several other great software thinkers and practitioners besides Joel and Eric at this conference, and I will talk about them in future blogs.
In the meantime, thank you Joel and Eric for a stimulating late night debate. And Joel, the next time we meet let’s talk about biking cross-country before we start talking about software. All work and no play …
Alberto
