3 ms·

yours and a lot of other comments seem to hint that this work may not be strictly required? I'm a bit surprised. At least in my case, as a public facing SaaS

yours and a lot of other comments seem to hint that this work may not be strictly required? I'm a bit surprised. At least in my case, as a public facing SaaS I don't think running Node 6.x past it's LTS window is a valid choice, so better to bite the bullet now. If I went about doing the minimum work, it just adds more code/complexity that needs to be refactored when upgrading Node.

hinkley 7y ago
No, it has to be done. But some people won't believe it until they've had a couple tough upgrades that show the cost of laxity. On one project there were CERT advisories out, and we had deferred upgrades due to breaking changes in those upgrades. All of a sudden we had to deal with the upgrade and a security issue at the same time. It was ugly. After the second time, we started putting at least one upgrade story per month on the work queue. Sometimes we let the engineer pick what they wanted to upgrade (just upgrade something!). Other times we picked the engineer for the work that needed to be done.
Techonomicon 7y ago
People are hinting that it is not strictly required to get what was initially desired done. And that seems 100% true. You do not have to do everything at one time. You can easily to one thing, and then right after that, literally right after, do another. You could have gotten the proxy up and going, and then upgraded node. It's not about "doing the minimum work" it's about understanding the problem space, what can be split up, and how to attack the surface area efficiently. You're also introducing other problems that can occur by doing multiple things at the same time. Generally speaking I advocate my developers to be really good at separating problem spaces and attacking accordingly. It's really hard to take on multiple issues at one time and actually have high confidence in not breaking many systems along the way.
- novaleaf 7y ago
  okay thanks for the tips, you and everyone else :)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Symbiote 7y ago
You either need to upgrade from Node 6 or you don't. That's nothing to do with adding a new feature, and should be planned accordingly. It's unfortunately very common for developers to hide maintenance tasks in other work, but clearly not ideal.
- chris_wot 7y ago
  I agree. However, to be devil's advocate - quite a lot of developer teams aren't allowed to migrate to new systems until way too late, so it's not surprising they do it in unrelated feature requests/bug fixes.

hinkley 7y ago

No, it has to be done. But some people won't believe it until they've had a couple tough upgrades that show the cost of laxity. On one project there were CERT advisories out, and we had deferred upgrades due to breaking changes in those upgrades. All of a sudden we had to deal with the upgrade and a security issue at the same time. It was ugly. After the second time, we started putting at least one upgrade story per month on the work queue. Sometimes we let the engineer pick what they wanted to upgrade (just upgrade something!). Other times we picked the engineer for the work that needed to be done.

Techonomicon 7y ago

People are hinting that it is not strictly required to get what was initially desired done. And that seems 100% true. You do not have to do everything at one time. You can easily to one thing, and then right after that, literally right after, do another. You could have gotten the proxy up and going, and then upgraded node. It's not about "doing the minimum work" it's about understanding the problem space, what can be split up, and how to attack the surface area efficiently. You're also introducing other problems that can occur by doing multiple things at the same time. Generally speaking I advocate my developers to be really good at separating problem spaces and attacking accordingly. It's really hard to take on multiple issues at one time and actually have high confidence in not breaking many systems along the way.

novaleaf 7y ago
okay thanks for the tips, you and everyone else :)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Symbiote 7y ago

You either need to upgrade from Node 6 or you don't. That's nothing to do with adding a new feature, and should be planned accordingly. It's unfortunately very common for developers to hide maintenance tasks in other work, but clearly not ideal.

chris_wot 7y ago
I agree. However, to be devil's advocate - quite a lot of developer teams aren't allowed to migrate to new systems until way too late, so it's not surprising they do it in unrelated feature requests/bug fixes.