Not Invented Here: The New Excuse

Google has recently been in hot water over its Street View cars recording all WiFi traffic that happened to be transmitting at the time the vehicles drove by. The software in use was supposed to just be looking for the names of WiFi access points in the area. But it appears it was doing so by recording all the wireless traffic that was being transmitted in the area around the Street View cars as they drove past.

While there's been a lot of controversy over whether Google had planned for this WiFi traffic to be recorded or not, one thing is starting to become quite clear: With some commentators now calling for the head of the programmer responsible, this might just be the first time where the general media is asking for a programmer to be fired for having reused some code.

Reusing code appears to be something that most junior programmers just refuse to do; asking a junior developer to solve a problem similar to one that has already been solved will often result in some code being re-implemented. If you are lucky, they will do so by copy-pasting some of the existing code as a start. Only with time and experience do developers start approaching problems by looking for some common code elements and then building something that both sets of problems can use, or even better looking for an existing library that can be used for both.

This approach seems to often be taken by developers who haven't had to maintain a lot of code. As a result, they may not understand what long-term issues they are causing when they don't re-use code. At other times, it's caused by developers who have difficulty in reading or understanding existing code. By re-implementing existing functionality, they chose to solve a simple problem that's already been solved rather than solving a hard one that hasn't been.

In the Street View case, it looks like someone actually did the right thing as far as code re-use was concerned. Google already had some code that could be used for recording WiFi access points, and a clever developer decided to re-use it. But unfortunately, the resulting brouhaha will probably make some people think twice about re-using some code they haven't written.

I'm sure I'll soon hear the excuse: “Well I would have used that code library we already have, but I didn't want us to get sued like Google”. This story first appeared in the June/July print edition of Computerworld Australia.

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