Mentality

Martin Fowler has been one of my favorite authors for a while now, I started out by reading Refactoring (though I should probably have read it a year earlier to get the most out of it), and later moved on to Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Right now I'm skimming through UML Distilled, I've mostly used class and sequence diagrams in the past, so I thought I'd check out what else UML has to offer.

A lot of programmers (myself included) seem to have a strong drive for NIH. NIH means “Not Invented Here” and in essence it’s the reasoning of a corporation or an individual that “Sure, Module X exists—but I could make it so much better if I wrote it all from scratch”.

NIH is not always a bad thing. If your situation is that the maintainers of Module X are using a too restrictive license and/or they won’t fix what’s obviously broken, then it might be for the best.

But, say you built an application for a company, and you wrote a feature