The resistance is partly political and partly because the
code is in production and there are no test cases that anyone can run
as regression. It's a million dollar financial services business in
the hands of a few developers that have no clue how to code. So there
is a fear that something may break and no one knows why!
That's a very real problem. I've been in places that didn't dare to change the
code because it was highly fragile and there weren't enough regression tests to
be confident that the change wouldn't break things. It's a very unpleasant hole
to be in, but it's not a problem you can ignore. I remember one time where we
were handling a badly-designed piece of code with kid gloves for about two
years before I persuaded the management that it was causing such unreliability
that we had to bite the bullet and rewrite it, and by that time I had
surreptitiously built up a large collection of test cases, produced as a side
effect of the time spent debugging bug reports from the field.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
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