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Quote: "There was no test environment. If I made a change, I had to test it in "production"." What year is this? 70's and mainframes? Because no way in hell yo

Quote: "There was no test environment. If I made a change, I had to test it in "production"." What year is this? 70's and mainframes? Because no way in hell you cannot, on large organization that had "Jeff in marketing", since 80's and PC's, duplicate the environment. Especially given this was used by almost everybody in the organization. And once you're done duplicating the production, and create proper test environment, you can start actually refactoring and creating a beautiful app out of it instead of just "To this day I sometimes lie in bed wondering what could have caused this". Conclusion - article's author is a whiner instead of a solver, no better than the ones before him that "copy and pasted at some point then later diverged"

hyperman1 5y ago
If the author was the only person editing the file, and had a reasonable expectation of owning it for at least 6 months, then yes, start building a second environment. But one antipattern might be that the file is being modified by other people, even if on paper he is the only owner. So while you create a test, someone you don't even know exists modifies prod right under you. Another antipattern is forever-changing ownership. You own it for 2 weeks. Then someone anonymous in some layer above you decides something else, and of it goes. Maybe they did bother to tell you you're not the owner anymore, maybe they only told the new owner. In these 2 weeks, you've got ownership of 3 new programs and lost it for 2 others. I've seen it happen. There is no way to build something stable in these circumstances. Management will need to provide some stability before the underlings can do any work. If you're living there, run away, you can't save them.
- unnouinceput 5y ago
  "There is no way to build something stable in these circumstances" Yes, there is. Since he clearly stated that started as a job assigned to his team, he could've version it right there where it was officially staying. Then it would've be very easy to see changes done to it by somebody else, even if who was that somebody else was unknown to him. "Then someone anonymous in some layer above you decides something else" He also stated in the article that he had a lot of time in his hands and tried a refactoring. You don't have time to do a refactoring of a file with 11k lines of code in only 2 weeks, so he clearly had at least several months. My conclusion still stands.

hyperman1 5y ago

If the author was the only person editing the file, and had a reasonable expectation of owning it for at least 6 months, then yes, start building a second environment. But one antipattern might be that the file is being modified by other people, even if on paper he is the only owner. So while you create a test, someone you don't even know exists modifies prod right under you. Another antipattern is forever-changing ownership. You own it for 2 weeks. Then someone anonymous in some layer above you decides something else, and of it goes. Maybe they did bother to tell you you're not the owner anymore, maybe they only told the new owner. In these 2 weeks, you've got ownership of 3 new programs and lost it for 2 others. I've seen it happen. There is no way to build something stable in these circumstances. Management will need to provide some stability before the underlings can do any work. If you're living there, run away, you can't save them.

unnouinceput 5y ago
"There is no way to build something stable in these circumstances" Yes, there is. Since he clearly stated that started as a job assigned to his team, he could've version it right there where it was officially staying. Then it would've be very easy to see changes done to it by somebody else, even if who was that somebody else was unknown to him. "Then someone anonymous in some layer above you decides something else" He also stated in the article that he had a lot of time in his hands and tried a refactoring. You don't have time to do a refactoring of a file with 11k lines of code in only 2 weeks, so he clearly had at least several months. My conclusion still stands.