The Pitfall of Programmer ADD

Programmer ADD: The (often external) push to work on many projects at a time rather than focusing on and accomplishing one task at a time.

I currently work for a small company and unfortunately that means I’m constantly being pulled in many directions. There just aren’t enough people to do everything, but lately I’ve started noticing the effect this has had on the quality of work I do. Since I’m constantly pushing to finish up what I’m working on in order to start on the next project on my plate I often don’t take the time really necessary to quality check and test the functionality I’ve added or changed. This results in work that is not as well thought out as it should be, and not as well executed as I would like.

I can definitely point a finger to my boss for pushing the amount of work I have to accomplish in a given time-frame, but realistically even when I’ve worked for larger companies this has still been more-or-less true of all development work I’ve done. As developers we’re constantly being pushed for deadlines and getting bugs fixed. This might be great from a management perspective on “work accomplished”, but I think this really has a negative impact on the company in the long-term as we aren’t really given the time necessary to nurture our projects to write solid and well-tested code, but just enough to get the job done. The result? Code that eventually has to be repaired or updated at twice the effort as it would have taken to do it right in the first place.

This is basically just a rant as I see the quality of my work declining as deadlines push me to do more than I can safely accomplish, but it also raises my curiosity if this is something most other developers deal with as well?