And you are here why?

“ Look at all the code I wrote! ”  —  #CowboyDeveloper If you hang around  #CowboyDevelopers  for any length of time, you’re sure to hear the above refrain. It  is  a bit of a catch-all phrase, but the situations you’re most likely to hear it involve 1.  Bragging Rights : Code quantity as a proxy for capability. Or, to put it differently, “ Mine is bigger than yours ”. 2.  Settling Arguments:  After all, it’s a well known fact that the amount of code you write is directly proportional to how correct your implementation is  . 3.  Continuing With The Current Approach : Basically the  Sunk Cost   fallacy , the amount of code that was written by the  #CowboyDeveloper  is consider dispositive evidence that the current approach is correct. The commonality to all of this are the implicit assumptions that a)  Writing code is hard. b)  Therefore, the more code you’ve written, the more hard work you’ve do...

/via http://geek-and-poke.com/geekandpoke/2008/2/4/the-art-of-programing.html “ How do we build quality software? ” It’s a pretty simple question to ask, but one in which the answer can take pages. For starters, what do we mean by  Quality ? We could get into the whole definition of  Quality , and go off on a digression about the false dichotomy of separating  Truth  And  Quality , about the need to fuse  Rationality  and  Romanticism , and then end up wandering off and reading  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  all over again. Mind you, that would be my attempt at ignoring the original question (See?  Thats  why I could never be a politician!), and we can’t have that, can we? The thing about  Software Quality  is that so much of it falls into a “ I know it when I see it ” category (with apologies to Oliver Wendell Holmes). Everybody has their own take on what it actually is, though you...