Consequences of doing “good enough” software

Question

Does doing \"good enough\" software take anything from you being a programmer?

Here are my thoughts on this:

Well Joel Spolsky from JoelOnSoftware says that

Answer 1

As a programmer I want to write excellent software that's defect-free. I'm not particularly interested in gold-plating, the act of adding unnecessary features that "improve" the software, though we all do it to a certain extent. In that sense, I'm satisfied with "good enough" software, if by good enough you mean that I've done what the customer asked and, at the same time, crafted it well and ensured that it is high quality.

What bothers me is when I take short-cuts and write crappy, untested code. I hate writing code that is buggy or where I've failed to refactor it into a better design as I've gone along. when I let a lot of technical debt creep in -- getting too busy writing new features instead of consistently improving old features as I'm adding new ones -- then I know that eventually I'll have something that, while the customer may be happy with it, I won't be.

Fortunately, in my workplace, management knows the value of keeping the code clean and I know the value of not obsessing over the elusive goal of perfection. No code is ever perfect, but "good enough" has to mean that the code is well-crafted. I've learned, and am still learning, to be happy with code that meets the customer's requirements and that the best feature is the one that doesn't need to be implemented. Fortunately, I have enough work to do that dropping features because they're not needed is a good thing.