chris clarke

Feature Crawl

Have you ever experienced feature crawl? That time on a project when features seem to take longer and longer to develop and less seems to get done than it used to. There are several reasons why this can happen, but I want to talk about problems relating to the growth of the codebase over time.

As the codebase grows over time it seems to take longer to add a feature. Adding a new feature often involves working out what the existing code does, seeing what functionality already exists that you need to use and finding the places where this functionality is available. The bottom-line is, the more existing code you need to understand and navigate through - the more time it takes.

So what can you do to help? Write Screamingly Obvious Code - code that your grandma could understand, code that’s so easy to understand what and why it’s doing something that a monkey with learning difficulties could understand it.

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” — Martin Fowler