Which is more important, quantity or quality, to improve programming?



When trying to acquire programming skills, it is difficult to make more apps to improve quickly, or to thoroughly improve the quality of one app. Engineer Kevin Jooss writes one idea on the blog about this issue.

Programming: doing it more vs doing it better – Kevin Martin Jose

https://kevinmartinjose.com/2019/04/08/programming-doing-it-more-vs-doing-it-better/

An experiment that appears in the joint book Art & Fear of the potter Bale's and Orlando's is cited as something that can not be avoided when talking about the 'quantity or quality?' Problem.

An experiment is a class that creates a pottery of a school. The students are divided into two groups, 'quantity' and 'quality', and they are asked to practice creating pots for a certain period of time. Before the experiment, the “Quantity” group was evaluated based on the amount of vases created, and the “Quality” group was only told that the quality of the created vases was scored. As a result of the experiment, the “quantity” group succeeded in creating the highest quality vase. According to the author, the “quantity” group learned from mistakes made while creating many vases and was able to produce good results. The Quality group, on the other hand, spent time thinking about how to create it perfectly, but it was not reflected in the actual work.



When Joes began to learn programming, he heard the above story, thinking that 'the best way to improve programming skills is to write more programs.' Of course, it wasn't good enough to do anything with the amount, and I've been trying to write code that is as bug-free, readable, and maintainable as I can handle the amount.

And there was an idea at the bottom of my heart that 'someday I could write a beautiful code to breathe without thinking.' It is because I am still immature that the code needs to be corrected, and I thought that a skilled person who had enough amount would not be bothered with such correction. But as time went on, Joes felt no sign of reaching such a proficiency level, and he seemed to be depressed every time his code returned without checking.

However, one day, Mr. Joss sees the following

essay .

The great German novelist Thomas Mann has left the words, 'The act of writing is more difficult for the novelist than the average person.' The best novelists were very slow to write, for example, the 20th century biggest novelist James Joyce, who wrote Ulysses, wrote only at a 100-word pace a day.



After reading the above essay, Joes seems to have ceased to stick with 'writing more code.' Mr. Joes interprets this content in software engineering and expresses it as follows.

1. Think more about system design
2. Modify the code freely and at luxury
3. Conduct thorough testing
4. Have a good time



When trying to achieve realistic business goals, the above actions are quite difficult, but Mr. Joes cited James Joyce, 'Joyce probably wasn't upset when writing Ulysses. It will be said.

Josh concludes that making good code even better and making ordinary people expert programmers may be about working on one thing for a long time.

in Note,   Software, Posted by log1d_ts