Many managers hate the time “wasted” on unit testing when a project is
fresh and new, but that investment pays off when a project matures. It not
only speeds adding new features without breaking existing ones, it allows
upgrades and refactoring without fear.
On Sat, Feb 5, 2022 at 10:23 AM Wendell Piez wapiez(_at_)wendellpiez(_dot_)com <
xsl-list-service(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:
Hi,
To Mike's story, isn't it scary to contemplate how much important code was
migrated in after being written surreptitiously as an effort to solve the
actual problem along with the immediate problem?
Less puzzlingly (maybe), what I am taking away from the conversation is
(again) the importance of unit testing and regression testing. If the OP's
customer had those, they would not have to freak out so hard about
programming style and idiom. At the moment they cannot see the forest for
the Tinytrees.
Cheers, Wendell
On Sat, Feb 5, 2022 at 4:05 AM Michael Kay mike(_at_)saxonica(_dot_)com <
xsl-list-service(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:
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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