Uncle Bob (A.K.A Bob C. Martin) posted an interesting thought about his keynote from Agile 2008.   The idea was a metric for code quality as measured in “WTF’s per second”.  That is, during a code review, how many times you see code that makes you say “What the F***?”

I like that idea, but I don’t agree with the proposed 5th Agile Manifesto Statement “Craftsmanship over crap” or “Craftmanship over Execution”.  Like all Agile statements we don’t NOT value the item on the right, we just value what’s on the left more.

I’ve always thought that the underlying principal of Agile practices, particularly Scrum, already preach about quality software.  The goal is always potentially shippable and bug-free software so maybe it’s the optimist in me, but shouldn’t the programming methods used in Agile development (pair programming, TDD etc) already police against writing crap?

If developer A writes crap and then code reviews it with developer B, I would fully expect developer B to point out what’s wrong.  I don’t think anybody wants to churn out crap for the sake of getting something done and  I can only see lack of knowledge or experience being the culprit.  This lack of knowledge or experience should be able to be fixed through Agile processes.  If a team member is struggling, help them.  If a team member is knowingly churning out crap, try and help them or boot them off the team.

I don’t think we need to update the Agile Manifesto to state the obvious.