Undebt: How We Refactored 3M Lines of Code • Hacker News Board

Re: Undebt: How We Refactored 3M Lines of Code

#141

Post by bigiain » Thu, Aug 25, 2016, 3:33 AM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #44

wcdolphin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I challenge that; I don't think a "bug free code base" actually exists. Joshua Bloch has a great article about this which I think may be of interest to other readers: https://research.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all... . To paraphrase: We programmers need all the help we can get, and we should never assume otherwise. Careful design is great. Testing is great. Formal methods are great. Code reviews are gre…

I don't think Spolsky was saying their product is bug free, just that they won't tolerate having known bugs.

Not even quite "won't tolerate having known bugs" - it's fundamentally acknowledging that you will at times find bugs in your code base - but that when you do discover bugs you'll prioritise fixing them above adding new features or hitting pre-set project deadlines.

It's a great philosophy or methodology, but it can be very hard to execute on 100%. In the real world there are deadlines and resource requirements and impatient clients and produce launch plans with set dates and trade shows starting next week and the Thanksgiving/Xmas launch opportunity and and and.

Re: Undebt: How We Refactored 3M Lines of Code

#142

Post by pkroll » Fri, Aug 26, 2016, 6:45 AM UTC

coredog64 wrote: post #124

denfromufa wrote: post #4

Why pyparsing, not ply or regex?

Jamie Zawinski wrote on Tue, 12 Aug 1997 13:16:22 -0700: Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

"I've noticed that when I get quoted in .sig files, it's never any of the actual clever things I say all the time. Usually it's something dumb." --Jamie Zawinski

Re: Undebt: How We Refactored 3M Lines of Code

#143

Post by akamaozu » Sun, Aug 28, 2016, 5:49 PM UTC

wRastel27 wrote: post #5

"...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…

How best would you go about objectively convincing the executive team that it's better in the long run to invest a bit in stability now?

Very new to talking with execs and I don't know where to begin.