Legacy Code - Tag - In a past life…

Please Don't Share Your Bodily Fluids With the Rest of the System

J. Timothy King — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:59:41 +0000

Have you ever been here? Refactoring old code, seeing new code that partially de-factors it, and taking out my frustrations in code comments.

The old comment for a struct declaration:

// This structure will be generated
// and stay with each connection

The new comment:

Refactoring the Monster

J. Timothy King — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 19:24:49 +0000

This is a story about my first software management success. It’s also a story about my first software management failure. It was a success, because the work got completed, and without any nasty surprises. It was a failure, because I could have made the team more efficient, and I didn’t. Both of these are good things.

Manual Test-First

J. Timothy King — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 13:53:06 +0000

Working on a team that’s not yet onto the value of unit testing, I frequently encounter what Michael Feathers calls “legacy code.” It is not unit-tested and can’t be. That doesn’t mean I need to forget test-first.

Honestly

J. Timothy King — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 17:26:00 +0000

(Note: This is a post from my online journal, imported into this blog because it tells the story of a real software project I worked on. Who says software developers don’t have war stories? -TimK)

I know why good people don’t tell the truth. That’s not to say they outright lie. They’re not dishonest, just not... honest. They fudge. Maybe that’s what I should’ve done. After all, that strategy is time-tested and approved. Software projects slip for months, one day at a time. By the time the whole story eventually is clear, everyone’s gone on to something else, and no one knows what really happened, because no one was keeping track, and no one thinks twice about it. What made me think speaking the truth up-front was going to feel good?