Saving time on code
I attended a course from Net Objectives for work. The focus of the course was on lean development from a managerial and non-technical perspective. The course was very interesting and one anecdote I took away up really struck a chord with me. He asked how long we thought it would take to type the code for a development project that took 6 months to complete. In other words, if you were given the source code for a project that took 6 months to do, how long would it take you to re-type that exact same code? Obviously, it wouldn’t take very long, most likely under a month.
The purpose of this question of course is to show how little time is actually spent typing, and therefore, shortcuts that seem to save time are mostly pointless. Typing $bal, instead of $bankAccountBalance may seem like a good idea at the time, but it really doesn’t save you time over the long run. Code formatting, intention revealing names and inline documentation take a little extra time, but on the grand scheme of things, probably add negligible time to the project and may in fact decrease the time as you go back and refactor the code at later stages in the project.