What will you do if your project member say to you "Manager, my code written from 3 months ago is shit, I need two days for refractoring"?

1. Do you feel angry because you think he did bad job without care quality or he is a junior developer who do not have experience to do the right thing at the first time?

2. You are agree with your developer but you are afraid that customer think your team produce a bad result and take time for correction that make project cost is increased?

With many years experience of project management in various team sizes, and senior project manager manage a big account over 100 members with my direct subordinates are project managers, I must admit that such situation occurs sometimesand it makes developers are afraid to tell their manager that they need time to make their code better.

Note that my 'bad code' definition is not source code has low quality such as having a lot defects or do not following coding standards but a 'bad code' means you can write a better code to solve project problems, optimize your code, gain better performance or increase re-usability. I have worked with many talent developers who handle such tasks as extra tasks not belong in project schedule and do it in their own time (though it is not a good for his personal time), but most of time all project members are afraid to modifying existing code base while project manager do not approve. Here are the result I see: the bad code is not optimized, it is modified base on new requirements from customer and it becomes terrible code with low quality, many defects. The cycle is repeated, developer are afraid to make it better, it become worse and so on. Project will have many technical debts and when the project size is grown bigger, team productivity will decrease continuously. Project quality is complained by customer or even they cancel project, otherwise project members must work overtime to fix defects with low source code quality. Most of cases, customer are not satisfied project performance and/or project members are exhausted, company lost profit.

It is normal in project management if we leave 2-3 free days after each iteration for team spending time to look what they did in the past, a knowledge management system is a tool for members to share their knowledge and works and project technical lead review solutions right away or weekly basic to improve code quality better if you do not want to spend much effort fixing later. Managing and developing software projects have many pressure: quality, deadline, customer feedbacks etc, there are not all software solutions are reviewed by all team members to give feedbacks about their advantages and disadvantages, there are some common API is developed by one developer and others try to use without giving any comments or they think they have no time to tune that API better. If you let such situation happens, your project has a red alarm!

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