Code Red: The Business Impact of Code Quality • Adam Tornhill • YOW! 2022

This presentation was recorded at YOW! 2022. #GOTOcon #YOW
yowcon.com
Adam Tornhill - Founder & CTO at CodeScene Programmer, Psychologist, Lisp Hacker, Speaker & Author of Several Books Including "Your Code as a Crime Scene" @codescene-softwareengineer6553 @adamtornhill2546
RESOURCES
arxiv.org/abs/2203.04374
codescene.com/hubfs/web_docs/...
Adam
/ adamtornhill
github.com/adamtornhill
/ adam-tornhill-71759b48
www.adamtornhill.com
ABSTRACT
Code quality is an abstract concept that fails to get traction at the business level. Consequently, software companies keep trading code quality for new features. The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up to 42% of developers' time, causing stress and uncertainty, as well as making our job less enjoyable than it should be. Without clear and quantifiable benefits, it's hard to build a business case for code quality.
In this talk, Adam takes on the challenge by tuning the code analysis microscope towards a business outcome. We do that by combining novel code quality metrics with analyses of how the engineering organization works with the code. We then take those metrics a step further by connecting them to values like time-to-market, customer satisfaction, and road-map risks. This makes it possible to a) prioritize the parts of your system that benefit the most from improvements, b) communicate quality trade-offs in terms of actual costs, and c) identify high-risk parts of the application so that we can focus our efforts on the areas that need them the most.
All recommendations are supported by data and brand new real-world research. This is a perspective on software development that will change how you view code.
Promise. [...]
TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
00:20 What is technical debt?
05:23 Visualize technical debt & code complexity
14:46 Quantify the business impact of code quality
19:02 Does code quality matter?
28:13 Prioritize remediation to large amounts of red code
39:07 Resources
40:25 Q&A
Download slides and read the full abstract here:
yowcon.com/sydney-2022/sessio...
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Adam Tornhill • Your Code as a Crime Scene, 2nd Ed. • amzn.to/44khqgE
Adam Tornhill • Software Design X-Rays • amzn.to/3DEeEnI
Adam Tornhill • Your Code as a Crime Scene • amzn.to/3FI5E2V
Adam Tornhill • Lisp for the Web • leanpub.com/lispweb
Adam Tornhill • Patterns in C • leanpub.com/patternsinc
Caitlin Sadowski & Thomas Zimmermann • Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering • amzn.to/41ztwjs
/ gotocon
/ goto-
/ gotoconferences
#CodeScene #CodeAsACrimeScene #AdamTornhill #TechnicalDebt #Legacy #LegacyCode #DeveloperProductivity #CodeComplexity #Complexity #CodeSmells #RedCode #GreenCode #CodeQuality
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[@andrejyevtukhov2830]

Incredible work, thank you very much for sharing! I’m a QA Engineer and all the data you’ve shown is very valuable and relevant to my work) Usually it is so hard to explain to the managers all these things regarding code quality / refactoring and rush without numbers. But now we have those + very cool visualizations - so thanks again!

[@clparenb]

Very nice talk! It is very useful to have a reference for good research with exact numbers that can help to argue with business people.

[@asdqwe4427]

This is incredibly cool

[@nyrtzi]

Is a DRY violation always a bad thing? Some folk sometimes duplicate code on purpose in order to make sure that changes in one place are way less likely to break something else. I heard this for example earlier today in an interview by Kevlin Henney posted on this same channel.

[@krzychukula]

No it’s not always a bad thing. As a counterpoint you can use en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_programming)