H/T to Brad Wilson, via Twitter

Bob "Uncle Bob" Martin of Object Mentor gave an interview to Charles over at Channel 9 while at JAOO 2007.

**** Video link here ****

He decries the current state of code in the general software development world and says that most of it is ugly. He talks about how software development has some engineering aspects to it but fails to adopt the 'beauty' or humanity of the creation ('character' he calls it).  It seems, to me at least, that most programmers take neither the engineering OR the character into consideration. Many problems which have been solved are being recreated every day in the software world.

But the main point that struck me even more was the idea that accounts have had to deal with the occasional aberration in their line of work (some digit getting misplaced somewhere here or there) and they have solved it by using double-entry accounting (placing the transaction in the credit and in the debit side to balance out, reducing the risk of random error).  On the computer side,  'cosmic rays' could zap a computer and flip one bit and cause everything to crash.

Here's his punchline: TDD is akin to double-entry accounting in the software development world. We call ourselves professionals, we demand professional salaries, yet many of us do not take our jobs professionally serious. We get so bogged down arguing over features and banging out code, we don't take time to ensure that works properly (even if it ends up the customer wanted something different). Even if we built the wrong thing, we should be certain that we built the wrong thing to work CORRECTLY according to our understanding of how it should work.

Learning how to build the right thing according to what the customer says they want, is a completely different matter, beyond the scope of this blog or its writer. If you ever figure that out, let me know.

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