Hands down, the urge of product to assume that codebase is stable and as nimble as a greenfield project, and so any feature can be build with minimal “we just need to make a small change in feature X to do Y”, while never allowing for resources to allow the legacy codebase to keep pace with new features.
The tiniest feature becomes a chess game with unpredictable interactions, not enough tests, etc.
I feel like this applies to all code bases not just legacy ones!
It's setting developers up to default-fail and making them accountable if they do, and the crazy thing is companies insist on this when a solid test suite and occasional cleanup drastically reduces the possibility of failing... setting developers up to default-win.
Comments
Hands down, the urge of product to assume that codebase is stable and as nimble as a greenfield project, and so any feature can be build with minimal “we just need to make a small change in feature X to do Y”, while never allowing for resources to allow the legacy codebase to keep pace with new features.
The tiniest feature becomes a chess game with unpredictable interactions, not enough tests, etc.
I feel like this applies to all code bases not just legacy ones!
It's setting developers up to default-fail and making them accountable if they do, and the crazy thing is companies insist on this when a solid test suite and occasional cleanup drastically reduces the possibility of failing... setting developers up to default-win.