There's no way 10M LoC can be improved without taking a loss in the balance sheet. No Way. Because in order to do that, you need to stop writing new code effe

There's no way 10M LoC can be improved without taking a loss in the balance sheet. No Way. Because in order to do that, you need to stop writing new code effectively and just heads down and improve things. The thing is, if the codebase is tightly coupled, you've got tons of work to do as typically you can't improve one thing without changing the other. In the absence of unit-testing, nobody has the guts to refactor the code without high-risk of breaking the product. I haven't even mentioned the cultural (human) issues that need to be fixed/changed as well. So people truck forward, like in any software development shops :). Speaking of which, thanks for sharing your insight working for Intuit. The article never mentioned the actual quality of code, but instead focusing on things that he improved :) (not a small feat, but probably don't improve the quality of the code).