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Discussion on: When is your code 'good enough'?

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Brian Greig

I consider anything that is going to be maintained for any significant amount of time to require some degree of quality.

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Itamar Turner-Trauring

It's the other way around: "quality" has no meaning except in regard to your goals.

If maintaining something is a goal, then your code needs to meet certain properties, which you then call "quality". But "quality" is not a property of the code itself, separate from its goals: it only makes sense in a specific situation.

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Brian Greig

Maybe I am a bit biased because my background is in enterprise software so code is maintained across dozens, if not hundreds, of developers and even small changes can persist for years. Having well-defined code quality standards that are shared across teams is imperative.

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Itamar Turner-Trauring

Right, and that's a specific situation with specific needs. Not saying you don't need those standards, just saying those standards are situational.