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It seems to me that there's a reasonable argument that the thing that creates the most bugs in software is the fear of introducing bugs into the software. The fear is not unreasonable either. If you do semi-major surgery on a large piece of code, almost guaranteed you'll introduce new bugs, and possibly even some big, hairy ones with painful consequences.
But, that fear of semi-major (up to major) surgery seems so often to push folks towards always only making incremental and/or localized improvements. And that localized approach also seems to tend to create islands or layers of disparate style and technique and tools. Newer code wants to move forward but can't pull the rest along. Doesn't mean that they are ignoring the cracks in the mortar between the parts, but they just are so loath to pull it all apart and put it back together because of the possible damage.
In the end, does that ultimately lead to worse software? I think it does. But of course companies don't sell software in the end, they sell it now and have to deal with the consequences of that. And this is one of those scenarios where there kind of isn't a middle path. The middle kind of becomes the muddle that I describe above, and there's really no moderate way to fundamentally re-tool and you just have to take the pain and get it over with.
The optimal thing would be to just start a new code base, taking all the lessons learned and building it right. But that's probably a fool's paradise. It hardly ever would happen that way. The expense and the complexity and teasing all of the intricate details that have been woven into the code and perhaps not really remembered by anyone, etc... Not being able to give up the folks who really understand the current code base, so maybe different folks work on the new one and don't really have that deep understanding of what went wrong the first time, rolling their eyes at the old school crowd and their outdated concerns. And the time scale would likely have to be way too short in order to be commercially viable, so it may end up just being a new and expensive collection of different compromises.
Or of course Version 2 Syndrome with a vengeance is a possibility, and it takes twice as long to have enough meetings to decide on further ways to explore possibilities for a deeper understanding of possible modalities for scaling leverage of something or another, than it would have to just have given a small crew of talented people a room and a lot of coffee and left them alone.
Maybe in the end, the above does happen, it's just that a different company does it. Anyhoo, I'm rambling while waiting for my coffee...
Explorans limites defectum
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I happen to agree with you.
It shows as in, I usually just refactor things to my liking. But this refactoring tendency of mine has been known to irk people... because, you know, we don't things "that way" here
(whatever "that way" is... I think it stands for "I wouldn't have written it that way")
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A thoughtful post. A former colleague of mine called it "verification inertia", which I think was very apt. Software would be more frequently refactored if it was easier to retest. But tests are too often lacking, or the test environment too difficult to set up.
Wholesale rewriting of code is fraught with peril. It's not often attempted, and I've seen it fail more often than succeed. Here's something I wrote about it last month: [^]
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I have re-written things a couple of times and in my experience it was worthy every second I invested on it.
Performance increases, load reductions, clarity and ease of maintenance...
But I was lucky, I was mostly a single developer team (in two of them I had a couple of additional programmers I was training), I had fought the bugs of the legacy versions long enough to be 100% sure of what was definitively wrong and I was pretty confident in what to change and how to change it before I got started.
I now am in front of a huge rewrite in a more or less unknown system... the original programmer (over 15 years developing this) is still here and is 100% agree with me, that we can't add some new features as it now is.
I think we are a good team, we think in similar ways and can speak about almost anything. We both hear the ideas of the other one and analyze all aspects. We both like to think about the structure first and turn ideas around to look from different points of view.
He is long here and knows everything about the current version so he can say if something is worth to try or is not going to work from the very beginning, but he is open minded. And I am new to the project, so I don't have old habits and am not blocked / blinded by established structures so many of my "why not...?" or "have you consider...?" are kind of fresh air that he likes and bring him new ideas.
I really think we can do a huge improvement and expand the action radius of the software to several new fields, if (a big IF) we are allowed to do it, because we are the only developers in the department with our bunch of daily routines / tasks to keep us busy and we estimate that we will at least need 1,5 years to do the rewrite (with around 30% to 40% of dedication within the everyday work), and maybe another year to add the features that we are sure we need to keep us or even increase our current field-share in the mid-term future. And we do know too, that without that re-write we might get "obsolete" because we won't be able to fill the increasing exigence of requirements in future projects / use cases.
But... sadly not our decision.
Let's see what happens
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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I have a few personal projects I have been tinkering with for years. One is a interpreter/VM for a language i designed 30 years ago - I have rewritten it in: Fortran IV, PL/1, C, C++, Delphi, C# over the years. I understand the code and its far from trivial so I use it as a way to learn a new language.
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I've known plenty of developers who were afraid of touching code.
A new feature was always "glued" to already existing code, no matter if it fit.
The result is almost always some Frankenstein's monster.
I say, we have source control so we can always roll back or see how it was.
We have advanced developer tools showing us where what code is used.
Just rewrite the thing if necessary and make sure you test well (unit tests, if possible, and manual tests).
Never forget to manual test everything you've touched.
I know some developers don't manual test because "that's a tester's job".
In the end it's my code and I'm responsible for it.
I'm the master of my code (even if I inherited it) and not the other way around.
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The last few years I've acquired responsibility for a number of our products that were written by someone else now laid off, retired, dead, or some combination thereof. One of the earliest lessons I learned in this is: If you want to get back to your real job, and the code you wrote:
Don't. ![Elephant | [mastadon]](https://www.codeproject.com/script/Forums/Images/elephant.gif) . With. It.
Don't rewrite bits you don't like, don't reformat the code to your style, don't refactor unless it's part of fixing the bug. Once you start down that path you look up one day to find you're the schmuck who works on all the old crap. You're also bitter and depressed from looking at poorly-written shït all day long, and the temptation to just fix it becomes irresistable.
I spent over 200 manhours a couple of years ago debugging some embedded code, parts of which had been around since the mid 1990's. Ultimately I found and fixed a bug in the TCP/IP stack we'd bought from a third party in 1995. The fix was about 20 lines of code. I probably could have rewritten the whole ing thing in six months, but then it would have been mine forever.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I'd say fear of breaking code is the symptom. The cause is not being able to read, synthesize, and understand what the code is doing in order to introduce a new mechanism which is stronger/more efficient/more readable/whatever your reason for refactoring is.
Sometimes, that's understandable due to a system being horrifically designed and having layers of dependency (the old house-of-cards or ball-of-mud syndrome). It's tough to refactor one piece of data when it's put into session and potentially used anywhere in the application, for example.
A lot of the time, though, it's simply due to hiring bad developers. Some people simply don't have the horsepower to do serious analysis.
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I think you are simplifying pretty badly there. It doesn't take incompetence or lack of foresight or anything of that nature to get to this situation. It only requires the realities of commercial development where people leave the company and take their knowledge with them, where just keeping up with the competition and customer requirements takes all your time plus some, etc...
Explorans limites defectum
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A-flipping-men. The whole team, stakeholders/management to BAs to PMs to devs to testers to power users to end users need to be more courageous in this regard.  Preach it. Take risks.
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A colleague was just rewriting some code that broke due to new/different behavior in an updated JVM. He was nervous about doing it since it was a critical function, but it had to be done.
I recommended that he enumerate all of the affected classes (hundreds) and dump the state with the old JVM. Apply the update and code changes and dump the state again. If there really was no impact, the before and after would be the same.
This is a typical practice that I do all of the time when refactoring to add a feature. The refactor should NOT change the results at all. Once the refactor is complete, then you add a new feature and you should see the expected changes.
He did that and found where his new code was producing better results because it fixed a rare but unreported issue in the older code. Now the new code can run any on either JVM and produce the same results.
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That's only doable on certain types of software. In highly user configurable, very broad software products, there's no practical way to do that.
And of course we aren't just talking about refactoring. In many cases it will require jettisoning out of date tools that have deep roots in the code base, and/or rewriting large chunks of it that might contains really complex domain knowledge.
Explorans limites defectum
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Unsure about "most broken", but definitely "least fixed".
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Diligence work which can be theoretically done in one hour takes at the end several hours, days.... because it is only boring stuff.
New requests which needs estimated weeks, can be done in days because I'm keen on to solve it?
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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I've got a mix of old projects needing new features and new projects that my customers keeping coming up with. I keep having nightmares where a line of end users are waiting in front of my desk, when another comes in and breaks line to ask for another report or program tweak...a fight breaks out and I find myself paralyzed...then I wake up! 
It's the new stuff that seems to take forever, mostly because there's no roadmap...unlike the rest of you, the only project specs I've ever gotten were handwritten on scratch paper or bar napkins...if I'm lucky, there might be a drawing! 
Personally, I'd rather add features/fix bugs in existing projects than work on new stuff.
When asked, I always give multiply a reasonable time estimate by 3.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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kmoorevs wrote: the only project specs I've ever gotten were handwritten on scratch paper or bar napkins
You guys are getting specs?
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In classic waterfall (the thing before agile/nonplanning/adhoc) writing specs is the devs' work. From that, a basic design is formed, and from that, a technical design. AFAIK, agile skips that and goes directly to implementation.
Makes estimating so much harder; it's like guessing at what date you finish the book filled with sudoku-puzzles, and putting a price tag on it. That sounds a lot like gambling
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: writing specs is the devs' work
That should NEVER be the devs work!
Especially in a waterfall environment, a business analyst (or more) should talk to users, stakeholders, etc. and only when it's finished hand it over to development.
In fact, if a developer strays from the written specs a tester should make note of it and either the software should be fixed or the specs should be changed accordingly by the analyst.
A developer is probably the least suitable person to write specs.
Agile doesn't skip it, it just doesn't plan too far ahead.
It's more like, let's write the specs for this particular feature.
Which features are getting specced or built next is up to the product owner who decides on priority (also with input from users and/or stakeholders).
The specs are then made into stories (or perhaps the stories make up the specs) which are estimated by the developers.
If any story isn't fully clear it goes back to the product owner who can then try to clear things up, probably by talking to the users.
In agile, you also don't estimate time, but complexity, in terms of story points.
The story should be done by the end of the sprint (usually two weeks) and every sprint can have x story points.
Estimating anything else than complexity of user stories isn't agile, it's a team trying to do agile in an otherwise waterfall company.
At least that's what I understood.
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That's a lot of explanation in one post.
Thank you
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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That can work for small companies or small products or products that are your own.
When working for bigger companies and with demanding customers you can't get away with that unless you can clone yourself and work five weeks in a week
I've been there too and it has its merits 
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Is reading between the lines a good idea unless there is a train coming?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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or as the song says "...there's light at the end of the tunnel, lord I hope it ain't no train!"
They call me different but the truth is they're all the same!
JaxCoder.com
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