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and... if after 3-4 weeks, it was nowhere near completion, or you'd hit so many snags it was going to take several more months, I'd hope you'd have the good sen
by mgkimsal 7y ago
and... if after 3-4 weeks, it was nowhere near completion, or you'd hit so many snags it was going to take several more months, I'd hope you'd have the good sense to put a cap on it, and revisit later. There's nothing inherently wrong about trying something like that, especially if there's some tests in place, a known goal, a reasonable time boundary relative to the potential benefit, and a willingness to stop if the effort is growing beyond the benefit.
Your experience sounds great, but it also sounds like we don't see that level of middle-ground pragmatism enough - it's either "no, we have to stay using PHP4.3.3 because it's what I know" or "we have to rebuild to cloud micro services to be able to scale infinitely without being restricted by schedules or budgets".
- maliker 7y agoWe mostly stick to a single master with our code, but this was one case where we branched so we could watch progress via test passing percentage to make sure we were moving fast enough to finish before we got sick of it. Definitely have been one or two refactors that have been shutdown. We've been lucky to have clients that give us the freedom to retire some technical debt/risk instead of just churning out features. And we're small enough (200 kLoc approx, 6 devs) that full codebase refactors are still doable.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoI thought part two of their post was just going to be another example of the classic beginner dev hubris. "I'll rewrite it in a week!"