The limit of process improvement

Posted by posted by Francis @ 2/14/2009 08:20:00 PM

Jeff Atwood had a really quotable sentence in his latest blog post: Coding Horror: Real Ultimate Programming Power

"Throwing a book of rules at a terrible programmer just creates a terrible programmer with a bruise on their head where the book bounced off."

This funny sentence expresses something that I have had a really hard time expressing for the past few years: Rules and processes don't make your terrible programmers better, it limits the damage that they can cause to your project.

Not all problems can be solved by adding process.

The only long term solution to dealing with terrible programmers is to give them the tools to become good programmers. Training, mentoring and support. And the training shouldn't be about process but about the craft of programming. Reading code, using a debugger, how to solve a problem with software.

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