Balancing Business Needs with Superior Code Quality: A Perspective from 20 Years of Experience
Understanding the Business-Developer Disconnect
Finding the right balance between what a business website requires and maintaining code quality with complete adherence to techniques like Clean Architecture, DDD, etc., especially the Framework Agnostic approach, is always challenging. The real struggle arises when many developers fail to grasp the essence of the business. Having never ventured into starting businesses themselves, they’ve not felt the growing pains of product creation or understand the comprehensive connections between various components.
A Deeper Dive into the Real Objective
Being in the business sector for over 15 years has given me a unique insight. Every software creation method, from SOLID principles, Clean Code, architectures, and more, isn’t an end in itself. The primary objective isn’t to have an excellent architecture. It’s about owning a system that works efficiently, can be further developed, easily modified, and scaled.
The Challenge of Integrating New Team Members
Equally essential, new team members should understand it quickly. This is especially true for long-term projects, given that developers typically change employers every 2-3 years. Hence, the system must be comprehensible and clear. A new individual should quickly adapt, especially in finding the business logic they’re to modify. Tools like UniTree.app have been beneficial in this regard.
The Pitfalls of Perfectionism
However, there’s an evident disconnect among developers with 5-10 years of experience. They often lean towards a very academic approach in discussions and meetings, striving for 100% art conformity. But let’s face it – achieving absolute perfection is a mirage. Someone will always find a flaw in your solution. This pursuit can unnecessarily extend the system’s implementation time, especially when many developers lack advanced experience.
Embracing Pragmatic Approaches
While AI hasn’t yet fully replaced even junior developers, this is where overly sophisticated approaches can fall short. Especially if you aim for the rapid integration of a junior/regular developer. In my opinion, we should aim for solutions that a less experienced developer can quickly grasp without much supervision. After a week of orientation, they should be coding; a month in, they should be reasonably independent.
Our Approach at Devpark
At Devpark, we often (depending on the project’s nature) adopt a UseCase Driven Approach with architectures based on Clean Architecture principles or microservices. Do we follow these principles 100%? Absolutely not !!! There are areas where we slightly bend the Framework Agnostic approach. But we’re aware of the pros and cons, and the advantages of our methods often outweigh the academic approach.
In Conclusion
While it’s essential to maintain code quality, understanding business needs and ensuring flexibility and scalability is equally, if not more, critical. Business realities and the perfect code can, and should, coexist. But, always remember the ultimate goal: an efficient, scalable, and comprehensible system.
At the end of the day, the client doesn’t care how polished and refined our code is.
What they’re truly interested in is whether we’ve solved or significantly minimized their current problems or those that might arise in the near future.