Sometimes I am amazed by open source software... even as I contribute to it. The largest repository of public open-source projects, GitHub, has over 35MM repositories in it. Granted, some large percentage of those are private, and therefore closed-source, but even if only half of those are public, and by all accounts it is much more heavily weighted towards open, the numbers are in the tens of millions. Add in other source hosting locations like BitBucket and sourceforge, as well as privately hosted sites like GNU Labs' git.

In the last article on serverless, I referenced the old ad in the New York City subways for a trade school. Their tagline was similar to, "technicians will always be needed, because things always will break." We technologists are familiar - intimately - with fixing broken things. Sometimes, it is our own software, devices or infrastructure; other times, it is someone else's. Either we have become responsible for it, or we need it to work under certain circumstances where it simply fails.

Although the title for this article might imply suggestions for Proctor & Gamble's IT department, instead we will address how badly code can "smell" and how and when to prevent it. In business as in software, the concept of a "smell test" is a base instinct for if something is a bad idea or implementation: if something smells bad, it probably is. One of my favourite technology bloggers, Adrian Colyer, wrote a recent article about a fascinating analysis of open-source projects, primarily Apache, Eclipse and Android.

Early in my career, when I did technology for a very large financial firm, we started with dedicated servers for each business process. It was an easy way to track costs, manage risks and allow each business unit to maintain control. Unfortunately, it was also an exorbitant way to maintain control. As servers became more powerful and disk cheaper, processes utilized less and less of their capacity. Even more than the costs of the infrastructure itself, the costs of the staff to deploy, maintain and support each piece of infrastructure could kill profitability.