How do I (tactfully) tell my project manager or lead developer that the project's codebase needs serious work?
- by Adam Maras
I just joined a (relatively) small development team that's been working on a project for several months, if not a year. As with most developer joining a project, I spent my first couple of days reviewing the project's codebase.
The project (a medium- to large-sized ASP.NET WebForms internal line of business application) is, for lack of a more descriptive term, a disaster. There are three immediately noticeable problems with the coding standards:
The standard is very loose. It describes more of what not to do (don't use Hungarian notation, etc..) than what to do.
The standard isn't always followed. There are inconsistencies with the code formatting everywhere.
The standard doesn't follow Microsoft's style guidelines. In my opinion, there's no value in deviating from the guidelines that were set forth by the developer of the framework and the largest contributor to the language specification.
As for point 3, perhaps it bothers me more because I've taken the time to get my MCPD with a focus on web applications (specifically, ASP.NET). I'm also the only Microsoft Certified Professional on the team. Because of what I learned in all of my schooling, self-teaching, and on-the-job learning (including my preparation for the certification exams) I've also spotted several instances in the project's code where things are simply not done in the best way.
I've only been on this team for a week, but I see so many issues with their codebase that I imagine I'll be spending more time fighting with what's already written to do things in "their way" than I would if I were working on a project that, for example, followed more widely accepted coding standards, architecture patterns, and best practices. This brings me to my question:
Should I (and if so, how do I) propose to my project manager and team lead that the project needs to be majorly renovated?
I don't want to walk into their office, waving my MCTS and MCPD certificates around, saying that their project's codebase is crap. But I also don't want to have to stay silent and have to write kludgey code atop their kludgey code, because I actually want to write quality software and I want the end product to be stable and easily maintainable.
