NURAMALINA BT AZIZI

TTTE 4333 SOFTWARE MANAGEMENT AND MAINTENANCE

ARTICLE REVIEW
Lavalle, M. & Robillard, P. N. 2015. Why good developers write bad code: An observational
case study of the impacts of organizational factors on software quality. Proceedings -
International Conference on Software Engineering, hlm.Vol. 1, 677687. IEEE.
doi:10.1109/ICSE.2015.83
Introduction
The article chosen is 'Why Good Developers Write Bad Code: An Observational Case Study
of The Impacts of Organizational Factors on Software Quality' written by Lavalle &
Robillard, 2015 discuss on the how can organizational factors such as structure and culture
have an impact on software quality. This article is based on ten months of observation of an
in-house software development project within a large telecommunications company. The
observation was conducted by the author during mandatory weekly status meetings. Initiatory
results show that many decisions made under the pressure of certain organizational factors
negatively influenced software quality.
Current studies have focused on improving conditions for the software development team
such as implementation of appropriate processes, hiring skills and use of appropriate
communication tools and equipment. However, there is an insufficient factual evidence that
can prove their effect on the quality of the software, hence the author states that probability of
constraints imposed by organization can affect projects success more than constraints by the
expertise and methodology provided by the team. Organizational factors include a wide range
of contextual factors with a potential impact on the success or failure of software
development projects. This article describes on how some organizational factors can impact
software quality.
In this paper, article summary, methodology and discussion about the issue being raised are
precisely presented.

Article summary
As determined in the article, software quality is influenced by some of organizational factors.
The major points made in the article regarding the organizational factors issue include 1) The
documenting complexity issue, 2) The internal dependencies issue, 3) The external
dependencies issue, 4) The cloud storage issue, 5) The organically grown processes
issue, 6) The budget protection issue, 7)The scope protection issue, 8) The
organizational politics issue, 7) The human resource planning issue and 9) The undue
pressure issue.
The article states that the company has been in the telecommunications business for many
decades. The objective of their software development department is to support the main
business process and provide software application becomes their main concern. For
document complexity issue, the existing code is poorly structured and difficult to
understand. Not only that, over the years, the company legacys code has become very large,
very complex and much the same of older software, is poorly documented. Some
requirements are discovered late in the development process. The impact on software quality
because of this issue is some of the undocumented features were not fully implemented.
NURAMALINA BT AZIZI
TTTE 4333 SOFTWARE MANAGEMENT AND MAINTENANCE

For the internal dependencies issue, the author describes