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Showing posts from February, 2008

Legacy Code, Broken Windows and Code Quality

Long time since last post. It's not that I have been particularly busy, just haven't had anything *that* interesting to write about. Well, this might be interesting: I know this legacy system. Well, it's not that much of a legacy system, it's barely a couple of years old. But it sure didn't take it too long to become difficult to maintain. Maybe you've seen similar scenarios... A big team of developers and consultants with lots of funding creates a big-bang super solution. Struggling to reach a deadline, at some point quality was left behind (or post-poned). We're talking compiler warnings, copy/paste code, hacks, quick'n'dirty ( quoting Uncle Bob : There is no quick'n'dirty. Dirty means slow. ), bad object-oriented design, the lot. Well, I have to say that 80% of the code was golden: agile method, top of the line modern open source lightweight technologies, test-driven development, code reviews, continous integration, etc. But that last 20%