Don't blame the UI design for your bad code

A couple of days ago I was in a meeting where one of the subjects was

 Why does this swing code suck?"

The code we had was messy, had logic spread all over the place and was a nightmare to maintain.

The answer from one of the developers actually responsible for creating this crappy code was

 The UI design changed during the development of the UI

To me this is a really bad excuse.


One of the first things I learned about UI programming is to always create a good model. If you have a good model, implementing the actual UI part should be a piece of cake. In this piece of code the model sucked. The developer explained that this was caused by the ever changing UI design. Have you never heard about refactoring? One of the key stones of agile development is to always do refactoring. If your model no longer matches the UI, then refactor it! Don't blame the changing requirements or design for your crappy code.