Your Code Base as a Crime Scene

The objective of the board game Cluedo is to deduce how, where, and by whom the victim was murdered based on clues gathered from the other players. Was it Colonel Mustard with the spanner in the Conservatory? Or perhaps Mrs. White with the candlestick in the Lounge? Use your deductive powers to ask the right questions, gather the facts, and determine the answers before anyone else and win the game.

An objective look at your code base should find a multitude of problems: lost architectural vision, questionable code structure, security through obscurity, undeleted dead code, inconsistent coding paradigms, copy-pasted code updated inconsistently, and much more! Instead of looking at the current state, let's look at he journey. Was it the sleep-deprived engineer at home with an misunderstood Stack Overflow answer, the Product Manger making unreasonable commitments on-site, or the non-technical leader making a technical decision? Or all of the above? The reasons are distributed throughout the organization with plenty of blame to distribute.

Join me for a fun discussion about possible triggers that started the decline of your code quality and what actions you, as the engineer, can take to protect the code and yourself!