Re: Need some Advice

Many managers hate the time bwastedb 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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <
xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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@xxxxxxxxxxxx <
> xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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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