The Importance of Design, Architecture, and Clean Code in a Startup Environment

I've worked for several startups, and practically all suffer from the same basic problem: money. It is a race against time to develop enough customers and/or revenue before investor interest, and thus money, disappears. But to get customers, you need code...usually lots of it. So, naturally the focus is on pumping it out as rapidly as possible. The catch-22 is that practically as soon as the company starts to turn the corner and become profitable that code can turn into a liability. Often companies pass the critical early phases, only to fail at scale because of short-sighted decisions in getting to that first corner.

For emphasis, I will give one extreme example I encountered at a very small startup many years ago where I was managing engineering. I inherited a hastily written code base as a starting point (developed by people who were engineers, but not software engineers). The lack of focus and interest in good code and development practices is perhaps best exemplified by the words of one of the co-founders that I will never forget. In a status meeting attended by the development team I  suggested that a developer at least extract a chunk of code that was "cut-and-paste" repeated into a single method. The Co-founder was at this meeting and interjected that this should not be done "if it might slowdown" the developer. This input, and even the notion that extracting code into a method would slow someone down, was a real eye opener. This was the most extreme case I've seen, and largely influenced by the fact that both the developer and the co-founder were hardware engineers, not software engineers, by background,  but the point is that sometimes even the most basic design and supportability tenets are disregarded in the flawed assumption that this is somehow justified in a startup environment.

In this case (as with most startups) the company did not survive long enough to become profitable, but what if it did? Would the weight of the technical debt sink the company? How could such a product be supported? Would there be the time and resources available to completely rewrite the code or would the company simply get bogged down in never-ending feature enhancements on a foundation that was already crumbling under its own weight?

So while some would argue that good practices is a luxury in startup environments, I would argue that the cost of completely disregarding good practices altogether assures failure. Clearly time is of concern, but "well-written" code need not necessarily take significantly more time than a complete hack. Some basic coding concepts can be applied with little or no additional time, including:

• DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself )
• Self-documenting code
• Using the composed method pattern
• Choosing well named methods
• SOLID principles

Beyond basic coding principles, it is equally important to spend time to design and architect the solution and at least consider the evolution of the system. I'm a firm believer that design can be broken down into iterations, similar to other coding activities. Start with the basic architecture required for the first milestone and map out where you expect it will need to evolve from there, expecting that the future iterations will change as requirements change. I'm not advocating for gold-plated designs, but you need to understand some basics of where the code will evolve to avoid coding into corners. I think you should fully understand the architecture requirements of the first iteration, and perhaps the next. For iterations beyond that, at least devoting some time to think about how well the existing architecture will scale can avoid pitfalls today that will be very costly tomorrow. I think this work should always be done in collaboration with other senior members and stakeholders of the team and should be supplemented with some form of "light" documentation. A day or two of due diligence can pay off dramatically over the lifetime of the project.