An informal experiment about not reading code

Over the past year, I conducted an informal study on how developers think about code reading. The study took the form of a dialogue that I have with software engineers. I had it in various forms with more than 1000 engineers.

The dialog goes like this:

Me: I help teams to not read code.
Engineer: Not to read code?
Me: Yes.
Engineer: Intriguing. What do you mean?
Me: Well. Do you agree if I say that you spend 50% or more of your time reading code?
Engineer: Hmm. Yes.
Me: Ok. When was the last time you talked about it?
Engineer: About what?
Me: About how you read code?
Engineer: Talk about reading code … I don’t remember … never?
Me: In fact, nobody really talks about it. Is it not strange that we are spending most of our budget on something we never talk about?
Engineer: Indeed. I never thought of it in this way …
Me: I think we have to start talking about it. If we would talk about it we would see that we do not really want to read code. We want to understand code.
Engineer: Right.
Me: This means that reading is just the approach we employ. Yet, reading is the most manual way to retrieve information out of data. And our systems are just that: data. So, not only that code reading is expensive, it is also the least scalable approach.
Engineer: Hmm… so, what is the solution?
Me: The solution is to look at programmers at what they are: programmers. Their job is to automate someone else’s decision making and they can use exactly the skills they are paid for to improve their own decisions...

The amazing thing is that I encountered only minimal deviations from this dialogue regardless of the experience level, programming technology background, domain and even country of the interviewee.

Posted by Tudor Girba at 14 June 2016, 2:44 pm link
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