The seven deadly sins of beginning Software Engineers

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Each one of these deadly sins has its root in the human need for excess.

In terms of programming, these sins are reinterpreted as some of the software engineer's worst habits. Even after a lifetime of learning and practice, without discipline, some developers fall prey to their human nature. Let's see how this "deadly sins" apply to developers in the programming game.

Pride is a common trade of software developers because they see themselves as the ultimate creators - the writers of code. In the programming industry, Pride translates itself as avoiding early feedback. When a programmer assumes he knows exactly what the client wants, but doesn't communicate with him, the software suffers the consequences. The programmer has a vision in mind about what he thinks the client wants, but failing to check with the client will result in rewritten code.

There is a programming principle that states you must design the interface first. If the client doesn't like the interface, then you redesign it, you show it to him again and only after he agrees to a certain interface, you can start writing code. Another interpretation of PRIDE in programming is "overengineering" - when the programmer is "in love" with his keyboard.

That means he loves writing code, even if it's not useful. The programmer shouldn't be just a code provider, he should be a solution provider. A proud software developer will start to write code before checking if there are open source libraries available, that would fit the project. A good software developer will seek every solution available before writing a single line of code. While writing this article, I spoke with one of our Project Managers. He asked me if I know how many code lines should be written, ideally, for a new project.

The correct answer is 0 lines of code. If you're a great programmer, you will find the best solution with already existing algorithms. Keep in mind that each new line of code must be tested and retested while existing algorithms that are available online have already been tested by thousands of people. The Devil himself played by Al Pacino in "The devil's advocate" admitted: The second "deadliest sin" in programming is Sloth.

Without a clear documentation, a programmer is just cowboy coding a cowboy coder can be a lone developer or part of a group of developers working with minimal processor discipline.

In a manner of speaking, a little sloth can be good for a programmer, in the sense that most brilliant ideas come from trying to simplify a process. But this can also be a huge problem in the development process if the programmer leaves out comments or fails to run automated tests out of laziness. Some software developers consider that unit testing is not their headache.

Seven Deadly Sins of Introductory Programming Language Design

They believe that time spent testing is time not spent implementing features. The more you plan for unit testing before shipping a code, the more damage control you can avoid later. By the time the code arrives at the client, it's too late to undo your mistakes. Leave your pride aside and do what is in the best interest of the project and for the client, instead of thinking you can do no wrong and ship a bad code to the client.

In the programming world, LUST means striving for perfection, at the risk of missing a few deadlines. Software development is constantly growing, and new development methodologies appear frequently. Modern-day languages tend to add new features, piling layer after layer of abstraction, with new keywords and structures designed to aid code readability and reusability, if you take the time to learn them properly. Otherwise, trying a new framework you just heard about, on your very important and urgent project, might cause you to miss deadlines.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

7 thoughts on “The 7 Deadly Sins of Software Development”

In software development terms, gluttony can be perceived as writing too much code. Every hour spent coding will require an extra hour of testing, and possibly two more of maintenance. You should really consider if you absolutely need to write these code lines, or it's just gluttony because you love to write code, regardless of its importance and functionalities. For software developers, the Envy sin manifests itself as not using version control.

In computer software engineering, revision control is any kind of practice that tracks and provides control over changes to source code. Software developers sometimes use revision control software to maintain documentation and configuration files as well as source code. Powerful and effective version control systems are available for free. There are also service providers available to host code for distributed projects for minimal cost. There is no reason why you shouldn't make starting a code repository one of the first steps in any project unless you can't stand to see anyone commit code changes but yourself.

Wrath translates itself into the programming world as hostility towards your fellow programmers. And what is more hostile than failing to comment on your code? It's true that well-written code is its own best documentation but it's also true that this code might live on long after you quit your job, so have some mercy and leave a few comments for the software engineer that will follow in your footsteps.

Wrath occurs when we forget to develop our code correctly. One can avoid the ugly face of wrath by using test-driven development TDD. We can also test both white-box solidness as well as black-box functionality.

It is also especially important to develop our tests as regression suites and to automate the build and test cycle in a continuous integration server environment. We succumb to lust when we code for our benefit, rather than the benefit of the product that we are developing. We find that there are things that we want to use, such as a new and cool framework, which have one minor flaw.

They don't fit into the product that we are developing. But rather than simply sigh and walk away, we scheme to find a way to make the framework needed for our solution, perhaps invoking the ever popular "future proofing" argument. We can harm ourselves by adding unnecessary weight to the code, and perhaps adding extra burden on limited hardware resources.

When we "gold plate" our code, adding extra and unnecessary code to handle "the next requirements" that we think will be coming, we bulk up unnecessarily. The problem is that we, as developers, really aren't all that good at predicting the future. But I can easily predict what your future will hold if you succumb to this temptation -- extra code to maintain which will drain testing resources. Sloth is present when we think that our embedded system software is incapable of being tested in any way other than in a fully integrated manner.

Escape Programmers Hell - Deadly sins of programming

In extreme cases, this means actual integration on the actual hardware that the system is destined for. While it is true that eventually we will have to perform final integration testing on the things that are actually delivered to the field, there are many different ways to test our code beforehand, using emulators, using test doubles and the like, before we commit to actual full integration.

We can only make educated guesses as to the actual performance characteristics, and, yes, we won't be able to test all race and other timing issues, but we can still find an enormous amount of bugs in functionality using the low cost development environment before we commit to fully-integrated solutions.

Mobile devices call for tough embedded software testing. Please check the box if you want to proceed.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Software Development

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