Re: Need some Advice

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