Comments by "Lee Rothman" (@leesoftwareengineer) on "Kantan Coding" channel.

@alexaneals8194 That just sounds like putting the requirements as comments in the code to me? We have better tools to capture this data.
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@alexaneals8194 Well that might be your reality, but it certainly isn’t mine. Writing & reading comments isn’t going to stop bugs, automated testing will do a much better job (especially if you practice TDD). Those tests will also let all developers know why the functionality is there. If comments are so important then why do IDE’s grey them out by default, they deliberately make them fade into the background for a reason. The application requirements are not just for developers they are for the whole team to discuss along with the stakeholders, how do you do that if is distributed all over many code files?
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@alexaneals8194 Not sure if the comments would correlate with the bug count. It’ll be interesting to get data on that to see if it does? As far as automated testing being implemented correctly I’d say that is most people’s experience TBH. I have worked in plenty of teams that do implement XP practices properly (as opposed to paying lip service to it) and the bug count has come down nearly 0 (0 for six months in one team recently for example) and time to prod has decreased by 66% (same team). As you highlight though it’s got to be done correctly. You need someone with real experience doing it to mentor and guide them. It can be a bit soul crushing when an effort in changing a team’s ways of working doesn’t have a positive outcome. On the flip side when it results in metrics like above and they can code, refactor and release without fear, work on new features rather than bugs then it’s a happy team and happy stakeholders. It can be done, I’ve seen it, I’ve been doing for the last 15 odd years out of my 35 years of writing code.
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