[eksemplar]

The coolest thing about ignoring trends is that most of them go away again.

I pity the fool who did test first development on applications with less than 10 functionalities for instance.

Even as a manager it's the gaffatape programmers who end up saving the day rather than the best practices.

Obviously I won't advocate against following best practices. It's just that people never seem to agree on what they are, making continuity rather hard to pull off over longer periods of time.

[boomlinde]

Having worked with delivering software on very short release cycles, my experience is that gaffa tape solutions often are the reason you need to "save the day" in the first place, where a well thought out solution could have saved us the headache.

The gaffa tape approach encourages further such poorly thought out modifications when the stacks of gaffa become a death trap that you either have to Indiana Jones your way through with a gun, bags of sand and a bullwhip or tear down and rewrite.

[hinkley]

It's really hard to get gaffertape version 3.0 out the door. Those best practices are ultimately about reducing wear and tear on the development team, so you can keep momentum for a long long time.

But since you can make pretty much any development strategy work for about 18 months, by the time the consequences are felt either those people are gone or nobody still there can paint a clear cause and effect story.

[eksemplar]

Which is the text book explanation, but you can gaffatape and still do SOLID, making everything easily replaceable later on.

The key feature of gaffatape programming is that it gets shit done, to make sure you're still around to do a 3.0 release.

The key downside of gaffatape is that it requires better talent, because your programmers need to know how to hack it in a way that won't ruin your codebase.

[marcosdumay]

> Even as a manager it's the gaffatape programmers who end up saving the day rather than the best practices.

Yes, the other ones are to busy fixing the gaffatape programmers' code to ensure the last day will stay saved.

[eksemplar]

I allcate more resources into fixing people who followed best practices wrongly, than I do into fixing what my gaffatape programmers made.

The thing about gaffatape programmers is that they learn how to do things that won't end up biting us in the ass later because they are thinking about what, why, and, how they are doing things by default, rather than following orders. Well some of them learn, the rest have short careers.

I mean, as I said, I don't advocate against best practices. If you want to gaffatapetape, you need to know best practices, because you need to understand why you are not following them.