Diminishing Business Outcomes

It’s not just the development team who suffers from the effects of bad code. It’s bad for the entire business.

Effects of bad code

Our poor users end up paying for software that doesn’t work, or at least that doesn’t work properly. There are many ways that bad code can mess up a user’s day, whether as a result of lost data, unresponsive user interfaces, or any kind of intermittent fault. Each one of these can be caused by something as trivial as setting a variable at the wrong time or an off-by-one error in a conditional somewhere.

Losing customers

The users see neither any of that nor the thousands of lines of code that we got right. They just see their missed payment, their lost document that took 2 hours to type, or that fantastic last-chance ticket deal that simply never happened. Users have little patience for things like this. Defects of this kind can easily lose us a valuable customer.