131–140 of 143 posts
"...time that could be better spent working on new features and shipping new code" Can we please stop putting forth this idea that features >>> reliable product? The amount of dev time that a company will save from removing technical debt will likely be more than the extra sales the company will get from a new feature. I look forward to the day where the executive team comes to the developers and ask why they are wor…
It would be nice if some research institution would pay for the rehabilitation of some huge, bloated, ancient, but relatively unimportant app. Ideally by independent teams in parallel. Just to get some real data on what works, rather than anecdotes from veterans.
Your comment opened my eyes. Considering the importance of software development in today's world ( and tomorrow's), the fact that those best practices or code management technics are found mostly in blogs, instead of scientific papers with proper experiments, tells a lot.
[0] https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/pubs/mutation-effect...
I would also be interested the thought process in deciding what functionality to refactor. Did you review the code and identify areas before unleashing your tool on it? With 3M lines of code gone, it must be terrifying to feel that it may have broken something. How did you ensure that it is still working as before? Edit: Grammatic corrections.
"...time that could be better spent working on new features and shipping new code" Can we please stop putting forth this idea that features >>> reliable product? The amount of dev time that a company will save from removing technical debt will likely be more than the extra sales the company will get from a new feature. I look forward to the day where the executive team comes to the developers and ask why they are wor…
This is paraphrasing of Chairman Mao:
"The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science"
And the ripping out by roots part brings labor camps to mind:
"After this brief period of liberalization, Mao abruptly changed course. The crackdown continued through 1957 as an Anti-Rightist Campaign against those who were critical of the regime and its ideology. Those targeted were publicly criticized and condemned to prison labor camps."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to believe we can someday gave the same policy for bad abstractions.
Bad abstractions are what really makes code difficult to maintain in my opinion.
This is the wrong way to think. Refactoring will save time by making code faster, more reliable and making it easier to build those new features in the first place. Looks like their biggest issue is bad technical management, not deprecated code.
This smells as being a need that comes as a consequence of using a dynamically-typed language. Because the example given seems to be just getting rid of the usage of a certain method, to replace with a new one. In a statically typed language, e.g. C#, you just mark the old method with an [Obsolete] attribute and go fix all the warnings. (Granted, a tool that replaces all these usages is also useful, but to me, there…