Motivating Beautiful Code
Continue Reading January 9th, 2009 Jeff Howell
A developer asked “How to convince someone [an IT manager] of the value proposition of great/beautiful code? (Or at least the value of code smell eradication.)”
This is a very real problem and is especially prevalent (in my experience) in larger, older programs that have met with some success, especially when the management are non-coder folk.
Beautiful Code is not an aesthetic pursuit; the Beauty lies in the fact that the code is well structured, concise, and obvious. This kind of beauty has high business value because it requires less effort and cost to extend with new features and to track down bugs.
