@Colin Jack or anyone who know, could you please point me on that talk on the twitter?

Nice post.

Like you I value greatly uncle Bob’s approach of applying OCP, DIP, LSP, SRP and ISP to remove design smells, but we mustn’t forget that Bob advocates a ‘take the first bullet’ strategy: the principles are only to be used to remove existing smells, not to future-proof your application based on speculation about the changes it is likely to face, because doing that leads to the design smell of Needless Complexity.

Martin fowler also has some great thoughts on when it makes sense not to bother with a good design…see his design stamina hypothesis (if you haven’t already).

Problem is that, as they say on the wiki, if someone doesn’t already know they you’ll have a hard job convincing them of it.

Got an interesting part about those agile practices

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Natural-Laws…
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From a blog post at:
http://bytescrolls.blogspot.com/2008/08/first-law-for-unruly-software.html

I have to say the obvious thing: Duh. Not that pointing it out was a bad thing! But if you reduce quality, in my experience, it has always taken longer to develop the product (especially with highly technical apps where nastier bugs can crop up more often, which is what I do). Often, the domain is difficult enough – you shouldn’t make it harder on yourself (I assume).

That doesn’t seem to be the case with you, though, Chad. If anything, you seem to have meant your points more aggressively than you stated originally. It seems that any difference of opinion is, to you, tatamount to blasphemy and unworthy of reasoned or detailed response. You’ve only offered insults and abuse to those who make points you disagree with. So far, your only counters (besides ad hominem attacks) have been tautologies, statements of absolutes and appeals to authority. Those who already agree with you may find that adequate. I’m sorry, but I do not.

Truth is I learned nothing from the experience. Maybe, just maybe, you can turn things around in such a situation if you can get the support of enough of the team and you can convince a senior manager that the situation is dire but is it worth it when there are places out there with good management?

It is amazing how one or two bad developers/managers can totally destroy a team, and once the first few good developers leave it becomes a flood.

I found your statement about losing your staff to be interesting. It’s interesting because that’s what seems to be happening at my current place of work. The new head-ish boss who took over is A) a control freak, and B) completely ignorant of any and all design principles (if anything, he follows most of the anti-patterns you’d see around the net) – and tons of people know it and are prepping to leave, myself included. What were your thoughts when you wrote that statement? Just curious. My boss has claimed in the past that, “Some people are fine just implementing low-level solutions all the time – they don’t want to learn more about software design and principles.” And I think it’s ultimately that philosophy that will be the reason that most of us are quitting.