Hell is Other People's Code

There are two real phenomena out there in IT.

The first one is what I call "Hell is other people's code" (with apologies to Jean-Paul Sartre). This is where you inherit a code base that you must now maintain and extend. You declare to all who will listen that "it's rubbish". You'll swear and curse as you read through it. You'll make jokes about it in the pub with your friends.

Joel Spolsky describes this pretty well in Things you should never do, part 1.

The second is what I call "IT Proselytes". This is where people adopt every little new "trendy" methology or tech that crops up. OK, so we have "agile development", XP, then Scrum... all of a sudden someone else jumps onto the bandwagon and invents "Lean Software Development", which creates further spin-offs. Then you have the proselytes, who gush about these things in their blogs in a bid to be the first to declare that they're using XYZ technology with abc process, and how you should be using it too... I guess there's a certain amount of kudos in this. It's the IT equivalent of inventing a new diet. "I used iXP and shed 50 pounds!"

Mike Spille describes why this isn't such a good idea in Action Hippo Rangers! People who are the first onto a bandwagon tend to be the first to fall off.