Where is the boundary between "Rapid" and Quick-and-Dirty on software development?

As you can see, it is a classical Dilbert comic strips, but that probably represent the truth in some spots, specially for those teams that just want to delivery the things, usually as a way to show up productivity. A potential problem here is when the “Quick-and-Dirty” approach becomes the rules and a lack of techniques, process, or even concern, put the “Dirty” as focus, postponing the “Rapid-and-Quality”.

I’m not here to say that “Quick-and-Dirty” is the evil, but I think that there are specifics moments to follow this approach and good ways to “clean” the code and artifacts during the way.

You need to take care, because “Quick-and-Dirty” is a kind of approach that seems to be comfortable(specially for maintenance context with the fast changes around the team), and it can spread through the team easily and sometimes creating a “group think“. It is easy to see as the detrimental to the quality of the software pop-ups just to satisfy the agility on the tasks resolution, and the firsts effects are deficient tests, documentation, control of software life cycle, and the low quality of the code.

If you change the perspective for the software maintenance, it becomes potentiality worst, where in a short time you can see “curatives” scattered throughout the software, without acceptable documentation or even unit tests to guarantee some kind of quality. A very common argument that people adopt to use this approach is: We are agile, We are rapid!. But please, don’t make a mistake, “Agile” in terms of software development approach has not the same meaning as “Quick-and-Dirty”, and even during the software development process if we decide to use some “Quick-and-Dirty” for some specific reason, we need to keep in mind a way to clean it as time goes by.

So, before you decide to dig into this approach or push it on your team, try to understand the potential side effects such as “bug and fix” process, that you will bring into the software environment, try to see if it is just a matter of organization, process or even good sense.