Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?
Most of the time when a team is writing low quality software it&#x27;s not really a choice. No one made a conscious decision not to write tests, not to do PR reviews, or not to refactor. It&#x27;s actually that the developers <i>are not capable</i> of writing tests, reviewing code, or refactoring to a sufficiently useful level that it&#x27;s worthwhile. If you&#x27;ve come in to the industry and joined a company that doesn&#x27;t do those things then you&#x27;ve never learned those skills.<p>Where Martin Fowler says you&#x27;ll see the benefit of high quality code in a few weeks he&#x27;s making the assumption that the team is capable of writing high quality code but choosing not to, whereas it&#x27;s actually more likely to be the case that the team would need to go away and learn how to write high quality code before they can start, including things like learning how to write testable code in the first place. That is a much bigger and <i>much</i> more time-consuming problem.<p>The article is absolutely 100% correct that high quality code lets you go faster but it ignores the root cause of the problem - developers have been writing low quality code for so long that unlearning all the bad habits and actually <i>getting better</i> is a <i>huge</i> undertaking.