In a previous post (), I commented on Joel's notion that duct tape programmers are not a bad thing. In review, a duct tape programmer slaps enough spaghetti code on the wall to make the solution "work".
I use work in quotations because the definition is highly dependent on time. At first glace, an entirely static website "works". However, it stops working the moment the user wants control over the content. There are numerous reasons why Joel is mostly wrong on this one and it all comes down to risk and stakeholders and of late, I have come to painfully experience many of them.
If the entire company is riding on "something" that must be delivered in a very short time frame, then clearly the cost of maintenance is obviated by the need to get the business. In this one case, the need in the short run, more than overwhelms the costs in the long run. However, in my experience, almost no projects fit into this category.
For most projects, it comes down to a question of risk assessment: "What are the long term maintenance costs in comparison to a bad short time solution?" For sites that can be entirely re-written in a week, the long term cost of spaghetti is low. If another hero developer walks in the door and exclaims that the entire site should be posted on The Daily WTF, he/she can rewrite the entire thing for little cost. If the site is large and complicated, then the long term maintenance implications are higher. Someone has to be able to read the original developer's code, make sense of it and be able to adjust it. If the site is a multi-tenant application such as what I'm building now, the maintenance implications even in the short term can be catastrophic.
With respect to stakeholders, most consultant developers have a habit of discounting *all* of the stakeholders. One of the key stakeholders are the other developers that have to maintain the system. That said, it is not the case that all stakeholders have the same value in a given solution. In a tiny solution or a non-critical off-the-shelf solution, developers have little or no stake in the solution. However, in a large, highly integrated solution or a multi-tenant solution, developers have a *huge* stake in the solution. Hard to maintain systems can increase maintainance cost exponentially. In multi-tenant solutions, quality of code makes a substantial difference in maintainance and thus cost and thus profit.
So, that's where I'm at today: having to fix a "professional" duct tape programming organization's evil spawn. Worse than that, there is there no penalty for such a situation to the original developers. They keep making sewage and moving on before any can find the smell.
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