Alex's Soapbox

If you’ve worked at enough companies in the IT industry, you’ve probably noticed that the most talented software developers tend to not stick around at one place for too long. The least talented folks, on the other hand, entrench themselves deep within the organization, often building beachheads of bad code that no sane developer would dare go near, all the while ensuring their own job security and screwing up just enough times not to get fired.

As most development managers know, the FBI's Virtual Case File (VCF) system has become the epitome of the software industry's most expensive failed project. Running taxpayers between $100 and $200 million dollars over four years, the VCF delivered little more than a mountain of useless documentation, nearly a million lines of code that will never run in production and a whole lot of costly lessons. Worse still, the lessons offered from this multi-million dollar failure could have just as easily been found in a $50 software engineering textbook. In fact, the major factors behind VCF's failure read much like such a book's table of contents: Enterprise Architecture: VCF had none. Management: Developers were both poorly managed and micromanaged. Skilled Personnel: Managers and engineers with no formal training were placed in critical roles. Requirements: They were constantly being changed. Scope Creep: New features were added even after the project was behind schedule. Steady Team: More people were constantly added to the team in an attempt to speed the project.

If you’ve developed software for long enough, you’ve most certainly heard of a “business logic layer.” It’s supposed to be the layer (or “tier”) containing an application’s business logic and is sandwiched between a “persistence layer” and a “presentation layer.” Some call that the “standard three tiers of an application.” But what it really is, however, is a bad design that leads to bad software. Or at the very least, dangerously poor semantics. In lieu of your standard WTF article, allow me to explain why.

Many years back, I got hooked in to whole the Atkins Diet craze. And like most dieters, it didn’t work. I lost weight and slowly gained it back over the next few years. The reason that Atkins – and all the other fad diets – fail is because they try to avoid a simple, painful truth: short of altering body physiology, the only way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more.

The submission behind today's schedule article was withdrawn; instead, I'd like to take this opportunity to present the practice of Soft Coding.

Earlier this week, I changed the name of the site to Worse Than Failure. A lot of readers weren’t too happy with the new name and many of you wondered why, of all names, did I choose Worse Than Failure. After all, what could possibly be worse than failure? In lieu of telling a specific story of failure today, I’d like to share my insights as to why there are – and will continue to be – so many spectacular WTFs (as in, for old time’s sake, What-The-F*s) in our industry, and why so many of them are, in fact, worse than failure.