3 bad coding habits of most software developers

And trust me, when I say “most developers” I include myself as I am now, or as I was a few years ago. 
Let’s talks together about the most productivity killer habits most of us share. I’ll discuss them from the less to the most common with my current experience. 

2 hours of manual testing can save 2 minutes of automated testing 

Unit testing is more and more widespread, but of course the game now is to explain why, in your team/context, you “can’t really do this”. 
A few of the usual excuses we tell others (and ourselves) are: 
– This is just a little project 
– The team is not trained/ready for this 
– We do not have time to write tests because we need to deliver features 
– Unit tests are worthless, we prefer end to end tests 
But 2 hours of manual testing can save 2 minutes of automated testing. Unless you won’t need to test your feature more than once or twice, writing an automated unit test will most of the time worth it (especially if you write it before, hence keep a testable architecture) .
Honestly, what would your customers say if you tell them that you don’t test everything at each release? Or worst, that most of the cost of the development process is actually manual testing of the software? 
Trust me I fought this idea long enough and was looking for many alternatives. As many beginners, my first contact with this method was something like “why the hell would you ever need this if you know how to code?” 
But in 10 years, I still haven’t found anything better than unit testing to deliver quality software and to speed up feature delivery in the mid and long term. 

2 days of Pull Request can save 2 hours of pair programming

I know the first point about unit testing is probably consensual enough, at least by the reader of this blog. And I know that this point about Pull Request will trigger much more discussion. 
My point is that, most of the time, Pull Request is a (bad) way to implement collaboration in the team. Probably one of the worst way to do it because: 
– It is asynchronous and necessitates lots of context switching both for the author and the validators 
– It slows done the flow of feature delivery as a Pull Request can stay for days in the review stage 
– It implies a relationship where the validator judge the job of someone else, and often feel necessary to add comments just to show that she took the time to seriously read the Pull Request (and sometimes it’s a true hierarchy relationship, when only architects or tech leads are authorized to validate Pull Requests) 
Yes, 2 days of Pull Request review can save you 2 hours of pair programming. Plus pair programming will improve the common code ownership, spread good habits, coding tips and domain knowledge in your team much faster. 
Should we avoid Pull Request then? No but use it only when it is strictly impossible to do the work directly in pair or mob. I hear you: “But my manager will kill me, 2 people to do the same tasks is pure madness!”. 
A first step to feel the benefits of what I describe here is to ask for synchronous reviews with the author. It will be much faster to validate it, because it’s easier to understand what our coworker means with her voice than with her code only.

2 weeks of coding can save 2 days of Event Storming

If I had only one thing to tell to younger me, that would be “Not Silverlight!”. More seriously that would be “being able to quickly understand any domain context and the human relationship involved in them will make you a much better developer than mastering any of the shiny tools around”. 
Don’t misinterpret me, methods and technology matters, but the challenge is to find the one fitting your context. Whereas most of the time we just impose our technical knowledge (ie habits) to the business (which is why most software are just CRUD built on relational database with the last fancy framework if you ask me). 
The thing is, we don’t care how good domain experts and/or the company are. The most critical point in software development is how well the developer will understand the domain. 
The best method I know so far to share business knowledge is known as Event Storming. It’s basically a meeting between technical people and domain expert to talk about how the company earns money. 
I know, business people are “really busy” and it’s very hard to get them for a few hours talking with you. The question though is, can they afford throwing away weeks of coding (or worse: keeping bad code and trying to fix it for the life of the software), when people will realize that the software doesn’t fit their needs? A few days of Event Storming, even with the whole team, is really cheap compared to the usage and maintenance of a bad software. And like for pair programming, it improves the feeling of common ownership of the software, more people feel involved in the process of creating the right tool for the company. 

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Why are these methods still unusual? 

First of all, I would say that they are more and more common, but of course it’s still far from the usual way of working. I think it’s mainly due to the following points.

Line of business software are so complicated that nobody can control them. A corollary is that this level of complexity should be managed by a team, with proper tools. But we usually ignore this fact, due to our ego or just by habit.
All these methods have midterm return on investment, and are thus hard to evaluate. It doesn’t fit well in a company with a Taylorist state of mind and management, which is still the majority.

But as soon as you accept the complexity of software development and keep an egoless approach, these methods suddenly seem absolutely normal, as a way to avoid time wasting.