How Intuit Manages 10 Million Lines of Code
J.D. Hildebrand and Andrew Binstock (via Hacker News):
Burt is devoting significant resources to code quality this year. “We’ve sent multiple teams of five developers into the Coverity logs,” he says. “They track down the warnings and fix hundreds and hundreds of minor coding issues. We’re cleaning up little things that have been there forever. The goal is to ship a release with zero defects.” This isn’t just a matter of tools, Burt acknowledges. Team and management support are essential because they must remain committed to QA every day. “It doesn’t matter what tools you use,” Burt says. “If your team doesn’t support it, if they’re focused on adding features, you’re wasting your time. If you don’t want to use a tool like Coverity to track down defects, that’s fine—don’t use it. But if you say you want it, then you’ve got to commit. The payoff in code quality is tremendous.”
Multiple teams of five just to clean up code? That’s quite the contrast with Apple’s app teams.
