"When my company, a large financial corporation, decided to outsource overseas," Ned wrote, "they went for the best: CMMI Level 5. Not Level 3 or Level 4, but Level 5. 'Heck,' the CTO told us half-jokingly, 'the offshore team will make us look bad!'"

"It's hard to describe the 'high quality' code that gets checked-in to our repositories. 'Bloat' just isn't quite strong enough, nor is 'incredibly horrible mess that makes me want to smash everything in sight'. There were a lot of issues with the code, but this one is my best short examples: isValidNumber()."

public static boolean isValidNumber(Integer number) { methodName = "isValidNumber"; Logger logger = LoggingHelper.getLogger(LOGGER); logger.entering (CLASS, methodName); // parse this number. If you get an NFE, then its // not valid, return false try { Integer.parseInt(number.toString()); } catch(Exception ex) { logger.fine(methodName + " returns false"); logger.fine("Number Format Exception when parsing"); return false; } logger.fine(methodName + " returns true"); logger.exiting(CLASS, methodName); return true; }

Ned added, "no, it wasn't broken. No, it didn't produce incorrect results. No, in spite of the programmer’s best effort and it getting invoked literally thousands of times per second under full load, it wasn't really that big of a CPU hit. But it is just hard to understand how anyone could look at this and consider it a job well done. Or for that matter... necessary for it at all."

"At least it's CMMI Level 5 strong, though!"