When I don't have my developer hat on I do some work helping development team improve their process. Recently I've been working with a very successful group of young developers who have a great learning management suite. Unfortunatly it is suffering from a growing bug count and the guys are spending the majority their time reacting to bugs rather than adding features.

The system is written on the .NET platform using visual studio. The project was the first for many of the developers (being straight out of university) and they took a look at the Microsoft tools available and said "hey this makes thing easy" and it did. For a while.

There are plenty of "organic growth" issues in the code base, but what struct me the most was the amount of infrastructure code for persistence, security etc, they'd had to develop. The sort of stuff I'd forgot about a long time ago. I realised that the reason I can be productive when creating a system is that for the majority of time I can just concentrate on the unique aspects of the system, not on the infracstruction.