Uncle Bob on Craftsmanship at Agile 2008

I had the pleasure of listening to "Uncle" Bob Martin last night at Agile 2008 while we were eating dinner.  Bob is hands down the most entertaining speaker I've ever heard at a conference, and I've had the pleasure of listening to him at several of the Agile conferences.  The beautiful part is that while he entertains, he always has an important message, and his message this year was right on the money.  Never one to shy away from big ideas, Bob proposed to add a 5th value to the Agile Manifesto: Craftsmanship over Crap.  It was great to hear Bob continue to beat the craftsmanship drum, and Bob's slant on craftsmanship is all about professionalism.  He drew a wonderful comparison to the history of medicine when some hospital administrator discovered that having his doctors wash their hands lowered the hospital's mortality rate.  The critical tie-in for me was Bob's final words that "doctors don't have time to wash their hands," drawing a parallel with how often developers rush through our work without writing tests and keeping our code clean.

The problem with Bob's proposal is that it doesn't quite fit with the other agile values. There is no value in the item on the right!  I suggest we reword it to "Craftsmanship over Heroics".  While there are times that we need to be heroic for our customers, making a habit of heroic coding ends up producing crap and burns people out.