About the Campaign

AntiIF V1: Origins (2007)

The Anti-IF Campaign was born in 2007 from an idea conceived by Francesco Cirillo after he and his XPLabs team were forced, through years of prolonged exposure, to repeatedly deal with their clients' hazardous Code Monsters :-).

As we know, quite often it is the developers themselves who add complexities to their systems, thereby impeding their physiological growth. Thus, Francesco wanted his fun provocation to be concrete and constructive. To achieve this, the focus was placed on a concrete element, the bad IF, as a way to successfully create flexible and malleable software, prepared to grow in any direction, through the use of objects and sound design techniques.

The inappropriate use of IFs is a clear source of increased complexity of a software system. And it is the main thing to avoid in order to keep Monsters Code under control :-).

The Campaign was presented in different conferences and was immediately accepted by an international consensus, and many software engineering gurus became supporters of the Campaign.

Anti-IF V2: The Research Project (2008-2010)

The feedback received from many programmers as a result of the Campaign revealed an incredible paradox. Quite often, the authors of the Code Monsters were not novices or developers with limited skills or professional experience. Surprisingly, the authors of these systems - the code killers - were almost always prepared, eager developers wanting and willing to do a good job.

As Francesco points out in his article:

"What's more, they were eager and willing to do a good job. They knew how to apply design principles and design patterns, TDD, refactoring, and so forth. They even practiced continuous integration and deployment."

As a result of this interesting paradox, in 2008, the Campaign evolved into a software engineering research project, directly guided by Francesco and geared toward understanding and addressing this apparent dysfunction. The Code Recruitment was introduced, which ended up producing a number of cases in which IFs produced problems that developers were apparently unable to resolve.

Thus began an intense period of research, carried out in part on the code that had been submitted, as well as by Francesco and his team working with external companies and experimenting with new techniques to build systems in a physiological way or directly taming their monsters.

Anti-IF V3: Sharing Results (2011-Now)

In 2011, the Campaign reaches its proactive form.

Through the creation of the Anti-IF School, a way has been found in which to finance the costs required to promote the campaign in universities and establish a plan for publishing articles and resources in order to share and continue the search for useful methods and techniques for building software so as not to generate Code Monsters.

The Code Recruitment remains, but becomes increasingly oriented and proactive as a way to demonstrate solutions for cases of bad design.