Why Good Developers Write Bad Code: An Observational Case Study of the Impacts of Organizational Factors on Software Quality

How can organizational factors such as structure and culture have an impact on the working conditions of developers? This study is based on ten months of observation of an in-house software development project within a large telecommunications company. The observation was conducted during mandatory weekly status meetings, where technical and managerial issues were raised and discussed. Preliminary results show that many decisions made under the pressure of certain organizational factors negatively affected software quality. This paper describes cases depicting the complexity of organizational factors and reports on ten issues that have had a negative impact on quality, followed by suggested avenues for corrective action.