Tar Pit stories

Hi there, Does it ring a bell those situations where you need a new functionality for your code and you cannot use third party software straight off?  A quick assessment along with a decision has to be made quickly in order to either doing something from the scratch (in a decent time) to fit the needs, or go through a tough process of adapting the legacy old code base to make it compatible with the third party system. Both situations imply risks and you have to reach a trade-off depending on the context. By and large, we are so used to rely on frameworks and packages that encapsulate some kind of feature, that we become lazy when it comes to build something we know it already exists, so our first approach is to try to adapt.  Since  CodeIgniter  (CI) turns out to be unfriendly in terms of testability, adopting the  PHPUnit framework  becomes an unpleasant task. Given my company current context, going through a massive change of the frame...

Hi, Today, when I was revising some classes of our messy code base, it caught my attention this comment of one of my former teammates, who recently left: Back in June 2016, when he was actually performing a refactor of the same code base, he wrote TESTS PENDING into a commit, bearing in mind to create some unit tests after the refactor. Unfortunately, we know we never come back. And this is something we all have gone through. Some of the important bits that Martin Fowler and Kent Beck encourage to do when performing refactors of legacy code is to move on bit by bit, small changes along with unit tests. [ Refactoring ] After a massive refactor, they also point out, it's very difficult to keep track of all the changes in case we break the code, and as a consequence, reverting our changes is necessary. Performance gains when shorts steps are taken since we minimise the time of reverting newly introduced bugs or rolling back due to undesired side effects. In short...