How do you manage this situations, what are your experiences about?

The Boy Scouts have a rule: "Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it"

What if we followed a similar rule in our code: "Always check a module in cleaner than when you checked it out"

-- The Boy Scout Rule (O'Reilly)

At work, we try to follow The Boy Scout Rule. Unfortunately, due to time pressure and deadlines, the code is often only a teensy bit better. Still, if you're swimming day after day in a foul-smelling swamp of legacy code, you need something to keep you going, to keep your head above water. Having the feeling every day that you've made the code better, rather than worse, does make it easier to cope.

This is a really hard problem and there are no silver bullets. And it is not just commercial time pressure and deadlines that leads to horrendous legacy code. After all, even Perl itself and the blessed PerlMonks code base have not been spared, as described at Nobody Expects the Agile Imposition (Part VI): Architecture.

In reply to Re: Good programming practices and changes in requirements: how to maintain good code by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Good programming practices and changes in requirements: how to maintain good code by DanBev

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