I was working for a company a few years ago: The company had been around for a while, and had a bunch of genuinely intelligent senior developers working for them.

These developers noticed that a set of common problems arose repeatedly over the course of several years, and there were being solved repeatedly in different ways, at great cost, without reference to the previous solutions. This seemed wasteful since writing data-access code was particularly repetitive and error-prone. Many teams were sharing the same database but using different code, so there were inconsistencies in how similar business data was treated. Each application’s log files were all over the place, and each had their own approach for error handling. Some teams would go off on their own and unnecessarily reinvent existing algorithms and solutions. Moving a developer from one team to another required as much ramp-up time as a new hire. Each team used a different build and versioning strategy, with the most common strategy being “none.” Setting up a test environment with multiple applications took days. Recreating the production environment was virtually impossible. Chaos: Dogs and cats living together: Mass hysteria.

To address these issues, some of the more senior architects took it up themselves to build a framework that would greatly simplify everyone’s life. By putting in a little design upfront, they could build a framework layer that would solve many of the problems that the developers had been muddling through with over the years, while at the same time homogenizing the code base.

Of course, the company had attempted this before. In fact, there were several previous frameworks over the years. But those previous frameworks were not as good as they could be, either because of design flaws, or changes in the way that the company’s applications work, because they used out-dated technology, or because the previous no-longer-with-the-company designers were now generally considered to be idiots. Anyhow, the new architects had learned from these mistakes, and were designing a new framework that would do a much better job of solving the problems. Due to the scope of such a project, it had been a work-in-progress for about a year. Sure, they were still working out some kinks, and it was not completely finalized yet, but this is a technology investment, and some growing pains were to be expected.

Déjà vu

Well, OK, I lied. This wasn’t one company I worked for. It was several different companies, all with the same story. In fact, it’s a little eerie how exactly the same scenario is played out at companies all over the industry.

Some senior developers will have identified some recurring pain points faced by the developers, and they are resolved to do something about it. As the company has grown, more and more developers have come on board, each with less and less experience, and things need to be brought back under control. By providing a framework, you can lay out the boundaries for developers to operating in, which will encourage consistency, will encourage code reuse, and in the end will allow the company to produce higher-quality software in less time with fewer developers: The applications will require less maintenance-cost over time. The company will wish to pursue the single ultimate goal that should be at the centre of every tactical decision, its overall long-term profitability.

It sounds like a brilliant idea. And if it were to be accomplished, it would be great. But the unfortunate truth is that it doesn’t work. Without exception, I have only seen this result in more work for the developers, longer development cycles, more bugs, poorly compromised designs, and (worst of all) excessive, unhealthily conflict between the development teams.

Admit it, you’ve seen it too. Maybe you were even involved.

So What’s The Problem?

So why does this go wrong?

The problem occurs despite the best of intentions. I don’t want to make it sound like the people involved are stupid or malicious; just misguided. In fact, usually they are excellent developers who are trying to do the best they can to solve a problem.

And the problem is not caused by the foot-soldiers of the IT industry down in the trenches, pushing back on every change the framework team wants to introduce. No, these people are trying to get a job done. Their marching orders are not to solve the whole company’s crosscutting problems, but to ship their product on time and in budget, and many of them believe, perhaps rightfully so, that the framework keeps them from doing that as efficiently as they could.

Again, the problem is the approach.

The Challenge Of Frameworks

So what is a framework? Generally, people think of a framework as something that helps you get your job done by providing access to new functionality that you didn’t have before

For example, the Slightly-Almighty, Moderately-Informative, Usually-Reliable Wikipedia says:

A software framework, in computer programming, is an abstraction in which common code providing generic functionality can be selectively overridden or specialized by user code providing specific functionality.

Software frameworks have these distinguishing features that separate them from libraries or normal user applications:

1. inversion of control – In a framework, unlike in libraries or normal user applications, the overall program’s flow of control is not dictated by the caller, but by the framework.[1]
2. default behavior – A framework has a default behavior. This default behavior must actually be some useful behavior and not a series of no-ops.
3. extensibility – A framework can be extended by the user usually by selective overriding or specialized by user code providing specific functionality.
4. non-modifiable framework code – The framework code, in general, is not allowed to be modified. Users can extend the framework, but not modify its code.

One of the key points here is that the framework is dictating the application flow, rather than the developer who is using it. This is what the Martin Fowler (who literally wrote the book on refactoring) would describe as a Foundation Framework:

A Foundation Framework is … built prior to any application that are built on top of it. The idea is that you analyze the needs of the various applications that need the framework, then you build the framework. Once the framework is complete you then build applications on top of it. The point is that the framework really needs to have a stable API before you start work on the applications, otherwise changes to the framework will be hard to manage due to their knock-on effects with the applications.

While this sounds reasonable in theory, I’ve always seen this work badly in practice. The problem is that it’s very hard to understand the real needs of the framework. As a result the framework ends up with far more capabilities that are really needed. Often its capabilities don’t really match what that the applications really need.

He recommends instead a Harvested Framework:

To build a framework by harvesting, you start by not trying to build a framework, but by building an application. While you build the application you don’t try to develop generic code, but you do work hard to build a well-factored and well designed application.

With one application built you then build another application which has at least some similar needs to the first one. While you do this you pay attention to any duplication between the second and first application. As you find duplication you factor out into a common area, this common area is the proto-framework.

As you develop further applications each one further refines the framework area of the code. During the first couple of applications you’d keep everything in a single code base. After a few rounds of this the framework should begin to stabilize and you can separate out the code bases.

While this sounds harder and less efficient than FoundationFramework it seems to work better in practice.

I’m not sure I would even call this a framework, because all of the things that make it work best are the parts that take it further and further from being a conventional “framework”.

So Are All Frameworks Bad?

Sweet suffering succotash, no. In my humble opinion, the .NET Framework is a thing of beauty. Back in my Win32 C++ days, MFC was not perfect, but worked serviceably well for what it was intended for, namely abstracting away the Win32 API. CMS frameworks like DotNetNuke and Drupal and Joomla have been become very popular. Apparently there is a subset of people who don’t hate Flash with a passion, and apparently those people love it. MVC frameworks like Rails and Django have caught on like wildfire, with ASP.NET MVC picking up a lot of momentum as well. Microsoft Azure and Google AppEngine are in the process of changing how we will build scalable cloud-based applications into the next decade.

Have you noticed a pattern here? None of them were built by you or anyone you know. They were not built to solve a business need, they were built to reinvent a platform. They were not built to get everyone using a “Customer” object the same way, they were build to make it easier for you to do whatever you want with whatever data you need. They were not built by 3 architects for 20 developers, they were built by 30 or 300 architects for 20,000 or 200,000 developers or more. They were not designed and built and delivered and completed in a few months, they were talked design and dog-fooded and tested and tweaked and redesigned over years by some of the smartest computer science experts in the business. Any yet, despite all that, most of them still sucked, and the ones we use today are the select few that survived.

The thing is this: you and your internal development team of architects are not going to build the next great framework. You’re not going to build a good one. You’re not even going to build an acceptable one.

And the other thing is this: If a framework is not great, it is awful, counterproductive, and destructive. There is no middle road.

Get In Line

By definition, most frameworks try to define a new way for your developers to develop software. The keep you from doing certain things that have been seen as problematic, and require you do things the “right way”, assuming of course that the architects have actually thought through the right way to do things.

The problem is that there are plenty of good ways already, ways that those developers are already trained in and have spend years mastering, and you are not really as clever as you think you are. You can’t think of everything. Even if you could, you can’t design for everything. And even if you could, you shouldn’t. Trying to shoehorn them into an incomplete, shoddy, and unnecessarily restrictive framework will only breed resentment, at which point you are bleeding money that you’ll never see on an expense report. The productivity difference between a happy developer and a disgruntled developer is enormous, and constantly underestimated. You will also alienate and drive away all of your good developers, leaving you only with the not-so-great developers that really don’t have any better options

Atlas Shrugged

In order to create a framework, you are taking on a massive responsibility. It’s not a case of adding a few features. You are building an entirely new layer of abstraction. In doing so, it is your responsibility to ensure that your framework provides the developer with every possible thing he will need, otherwise he will be stuck. If you create a data access framework, but never quite could figure out how to get BLOBs working, you’re really leaving the developer up a creek when he needs to store BLOBs. Sure, it’s a growth process, and there are always bugs to be fixed and features to be added, but when you are forcing a development team to use this framework, and in the 11th hour they realize it doesn’t have a critical feature that they need, you are introducing more obstacles then you are removing.

But We Have To Create Reusable Code!

In my early years, I was dogmatically taught never to write the same code twice. Anytime you see duplicated code, or even similar code, refactor it into a function, right? What if the code was slightly different? Create some parameters. What if you need one extra field in some cases? Add a little logic around that to decide what to return. What if you run into a case where you can’t fix one caller without breaking another caller? Add another layer of abstraction and logical branching to your function. At this point, you started out trying to improve your code-hygiene a little bit, and all you’ve done is spend the whole day creating a monstrosity that is almost impossible to understand. Well sure, you don’t think so, but hey, nobody likes to admit their kids are ugly.

Always, always, always, stop and ask yourself, “Am I creating more problems them I am solving?”

Keep It Simple!

The fact of the matter is, when you try to create reusable code, you are, instead, making things a lot more complicated. It’s rarely a case of just taking what you have already written and exposing it to another component or team.

If you are using the code for yourself, you just have to make sure it works for you based on how you are going to use it, and you should be able to clearly visualize all of the possible scenarios. However, in order to make the code reusable within a framework, you are creating a black box to be called by another developer; as such you need to make it work no matter what, with any sort of crazy input, and you will need to make sure that it is clearly reporting back to the caller when something goes wrong. You need to make sure that the interface makes sense to everyone, not just you. You may even need to write up some documentation (ugh). And when you are all done and have covered every base, someone will call your component in a way you never expected, and of course it won’t work because all of the code we write is rife with bugs, and everyone will argue about how this component “should” be used, and someone will demand to see the unit test coverage stats, and someone else will schedule a meeting to define the scope, and someone else ramble on about how we need a framework, and the manager rolls his eyes and swears never to let these damn developers try to build something fancy again, and nobody is actually getting any real work done.

Worser Is More Gooder

Of course, some will argue that you should always try to make your components as reusable as possible, because it requires you to work through all of those quality issues no matter what, and will produce better software. This would be great if your sole goal was to create the best software in the world, but nobody is paying you to do that. No, you are being paid to write software of sufficient quality within the time and budget allotted. If you spend unnecessarily time gold-plating your code, it may make you feel cool, but it is outright wasteful. I’m not saying to cut corners when you should not, but I what I AM saying is that there definitely are times when it actually does make sense to cut comers. You need to draw a line in the sand of exactly how good this product really needs to be and stick to that, otherwise you’ll never finish. You can software that is really cool, or you can build software that ships. Only one of those options is actually useful to society.

But, But, But who is going to test this monster…

OK, so don’t make something reusable if you done need to. However, what if you think you are going to need it to be reusable? I have a secret to tell you: YAGNI.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been working on a very specific implementation to solve a very specific problem, and somebody (who usually has initials in his job title) chimes in saying “well, make this and that and the other thing configurable, so when we sell some other product to some other company, we can include it just by flipping a few switches.” This person is figuring that “it’s just an ‘if’ statement, what’s the big deal?”, but that person is not taking into account the increased code complexity and the exponential increase in testing requirements. Often times, this is even a former developer, who actually knows how code works, but has been out of the trenches for long enough that it has impaired their judgment about code complexity and its day-to-day impacts.

The easiest code
 to refactor is the
 code that doesn’t
 yet exist.

But then again, math solves everything. Say your QA department originally had 143 test scripts to run through before release, and now you’ve added some new configurable switch into the system. If you really want to be thorough, you should now have 286 test scripts, because you now have to retest everything with the switch turned on, and then again with the switch turned off. Say you had actually added to different switches? 572 test scripts. That’s a lot of work for a feature that will never get used. And come on, between you and me and the desk, we all know that Mr. Executive SVP COO is never going to close those magical deals with XYZ Bank and ABC Manufacturing, partly because he has no idea what he’s selling, but also partly because you guys can’t ship anything because you now have 1144 test scripts to run through to get a small release out the door.

So How Do I Know What To Reuse?

If you aren’t going stand around and guess what to reuse, how we will know? Easy, stop trying to prematurely reuse anything. Instead, refactor your existing code to reuse that which is already duplicated, where you can reasonably say will actually benefit from reuse and reduce overall maintenance and complexity.

How do you know when that is? Use that fancy experience and judgment of yours, it’s the only thing that separates you from the robots that will be doing your job some day.

Never build something to
be reused until you actually
have two systems that
actually need to reuse it
right now.

Never build something to be reused until you actually have two systems that actually need to reuse it right now. If you only have one thing that will use it right now, and that other mythical feature will also use it some day, deal with it when that feature comes along (hint: never). Even if that feature comes along, the changes that you actually predicted and designed for it correctly is approximately zero, so you’re still going to have to make design changes anyway. However, if you kept it lean and simple, it’s simply a matter of adding the new code you need to a small lightweight base. But if you tried to build something big and fancy and configurable, you’ll now have to spend twice as much time disassembling all the unnecessarily complicated junk you build around it to support the thing that you were unsuccessfully trying to support in the first place. The easiest code to refactor is the code that doesn’t yet exist.

So What?

So do we give up? Maybe. It depends.

So how do you boil the ocean? There are two answers:

1. You don’t. It’s too big of a problem.
2. One pot at a time.

It all depends on your goal. Is it critically important that you actually boil the entire ocean, or do you benefit from every little bit?

Ask yourself, do you REALLY need a framework? Do you REALLY have a problem here that needs to be solved? Do you REALLY think you will save your company time and money by pursuing this? Be honest. Try to be objective. If you find yourself getting the slightest bit excited about the idea of building a framework, then back off; you are not thinking clearly.

Sure, a well-design framework may save time and money once it is complete, but it may never be complete, and it may never be any good, and the small improvement may not save your company enough to justify the huge expense. As awful as it may seem, the honest answer may be that it is in your company’s best interest to plough ahead with the same busted up junk you’ve had all along. It may not be the most rewarding thing in the world, but you are probably not getting paid to fulfil your dreams, you are getting paid to write the damn code.

Keep it simple.
Keep it low-impact.
Keep it clean.
Put the big guns away.

So what do we do? Are we doomed to mediocrity? Not necessarily. The other option is to get your head out of the clouds and solve a few small problems at a time. Keep your eye out for redundancies and duplicated code, make note of them, but don’t do anything right away. When you are building a new component, don’t pull your hair out if it slightly resembles some other code, you don’t have to reuse use everything. Once you’ve identified a few low-hanging redundancies, go back and build some small libraries to consolidate that code. Don’t think big picture. Keep it simple. Keep it low-impact. Keep it clean. Put the big guns away. Keep constantly refactoring to make it a little better every day, and before you know it you’ll have system that doesn’t completely suck.

Too much legacy code never gets cleaned up because everyone thinks it is too hard to throw it all out and rewrite it, and no project manager will allow the developers to waste time refactoring code that already works. They are all probably right. A huge refactoring project is probably a waste of money, and it will almost certainly fail. But small, steady, incremental improvements will almost certainly make your world a better place.