Subject: encouraging adherence and discouraging circumvention From: brlewis@MIT.EDU Date: Wed, 12 Apr 95 11:21:14 -0400 To: orange@MIT.EDU There seems to be sentiment that if we have a process whose benefits are obvious to all developers, then no prodding will be needed to get developers to follow it. This is simply not true. For example, take the process of commenting your code. No developer would disagree with commenting code. It's clearly the right thing to do. Anybody could rattle off the benefits of it without missing a beat. Nevertheless, examples abound of uncommented code. Somehow, the delayed gratification of having code that can be easily understood fails to motivate people to put in that extra effort and write some English in the midst of coding. I hope we won't waste much time on this issue at the review. It's just too obvious that accountability is needed.