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It would be nice if some research institution would pay for the rehabilitation of some huge, bloated, ancient, but relatively unimportant app. Ideally by indepe
by vintermann 10y ago
It would be nice if some research institution would pay for the rehabilitation of some huge, bloated, ancient, but relatively unimportant app. Ideally by independent teams in parallel.
Just to get some real data on what works, rather than anecdotes from veterans.
- bsaul 10y agoYour comment opened my eyes. Considering the importance of software development in today's world ( and tomorrow's), the fact that those best practices or code management technics are found mostly in blogs, instead of scientific papers with proper experiments, tells a lot.
- skrebbel 10y agoI don't follow. What does it tell?
- sidlls 10y agoHave you heard of the term/phrase "bro science" with respect to weight lifting? I'd draw an analogy between them. Clarification: what I mean is there is a lot of ad-hoc stuff in these blogs that may be narrowly true or applicable to a given project or subset of a domain, but generally there is either significant evidence against some of these blogs' contents or the contents themselves have absolutely no formal, rigorous support.
- falsedan 10y agoThere is a strong field exploring this subject, but it's called 'software verification'. Here's a paper on automated defect detection [0], which is effectively a study on how to write good tests. [0] https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/pubs/mutation-effectiveness-fse2014.pdf https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/pubs/mutation-effect...
- _asummers 10y agoI enjoy refactoring, I'd help with something like this.
- jobigoud 10y agoI think the pain in refactoring is not the refactoring itself, it's the weeks spent creating a mental map of a foreign and architecturally broken codebase (but which sorta works). Even to write the non-reg tests before even considering the refactor, much time must be spent becoming an expert in something that will die soon.
- rocqua 10y agoWhere do I sign up? Seriously, this sounds like exactly my kinda gig.
- Dirlewanger 10y agoUnfortunately I envision something like that just being bikeshedded to all hell by crowds like this which would undoubtedly trivialize the results.