Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
A Matter of Will
For any of this to happen, though, we need more than just the software development community speaking up. CTOs, CIOs, directors, and anyone else who sponsors software projects should be thinking not just about quality, but, given the ominous financial Sword of Damocles that is technical debt, waking up at night in a cold sweat, worried about it.
Until that happens, until we have quality integrated into the Statement of Work that governs a software project, to expect the level of technical debt in corporate software to decline will be more hope than reality for many more years to come.
Conclusion
Allowing low code quality, taking on technical debt that costs your organization money for years on end, is an expensive way to lower initial project development costs. Yet, without an active effort to integrate quality metrics into the Statements of Work that ultimately control software projects, code quality is likely to remain low, and ongoing costs for software are likely to remain high. Quality metrics exist, and can be integrated, but that requires a change in the way we write our Statements of Work—and it requires that buyers of technology services understand the differences between one bid that doesn't deal with quality, and others that do.
Are you measuring quality?