Writing Enough Code

Test Driven Development talks about writing enough code to pass the test. XP (Extreme Programming) talks about writing just enough code to meet the requirements. In both cases they make a case that you should not could for things that are not required, nor should you code for possibilities that may or may not occur.

This can easily get taken to extreme, however. I worked with a young man who took the idea of “just enough code” and went too far with it. He was writing an application that was designed to accept yearly reports. It was known from the start that the reports needed to be stored by year, searched by year, printed by year, etc. However, in the first release there was no historical data that needed to be kept, everything was in the current year. So, guess what? He omitted years from everything he did, database and code, because “it wasn’t necessary for this release of the application”.

Yes, write just enough code, but also use common sense. If you know for a fact that you are going to need to do something in a future release, don’t ignore that fact just because the current release doesn’t require it. If you know that you need to handle multiple years, design and code for that early on, even if the year is always going to be the same. Writing just enough code and common sense are not mutually exclusive ideas, at least, for most people.