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>Weirdly, teams seem to adapt better to bad code. The greenfield team usually adapts well to its own buggy code. They know the system so well inside-out that i
by carlmr 2y ago
>Weirdly, teams seem to adapt better to bad code.
The greenfield team usually adapts well to its own buggy code. They know the system so well inside-out that if a bug pops up they have a general idea why.
This is bad, because with natural fluctuation in team members this institutional knowledge is lost. New members don't have the benefit of knowing about the whole evolution with all its quirks, and don't have the unit tests from the previous team to prevent regressions.
This then slows velocity to near zero as the team gets replaced, and leads to the inevitable rewrite.
- marcosdumay 2y agoMy experience is that people adapt differently to different issues, so in a team people can specialize better on the types of bad code they handle best. So the code quality degrades less their productivity while they are working than if each person had to deal with the entire diversity alone. But that implies on a division of work that is not aligned with any communication-reducing objective.