Decreasing Team Performance

Bad code and team performance

A good way to look at bad code is code lacking the technical practices that help other developers understand what it is doing. When we’re coding solo, it doesn’t matter so much. Bad code will just slow you down and feel a little demoralizing at times. It does not affect anybody else. However, most professionals code in development teams, which is a whole different ball game. Bad code really slows a team down. The following two studies are interesting as far as this is concerned:

• Technical debt cripples software developer productivityhttps://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3194164.3194178: A longitudinal study on developers’ daily software development work.

• Software developer productivity loss due to technical debthttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/ S0164121219301335: A replication and extension study examining developers’ development work.

Case studies analysis

The first study shows that developers waste up to 23% of their time on bad code. The second study shows that in 25% of cases of working with bad code, developers are forced to increase the amount of bad code still further.