
Don't Be Afraid to Break Stuff - danw
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000123.html
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jacobscott
I suggest a title edit: "Don't be afraid to break stuff in your local checkout
of version-controlled stuff."

Especially with large projects with many dependencies, breaking the wrong
thing in the wrong way can screw everything up in ways that end up taking many
hours and debugger voodoo to properly put back together again. I see these
often enough in production -- I feel no need to give myself more ugly, scary
bugs to fix just for the experience.

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denglish
Don't know about this. In my experience the best way to take fear out of a
codebase is to have a rigorous unit testing and continuous build platform.
I've got no problem with refactoring but would like to think it has a bit more
of a design element to it. Perhaps time is better spent fixing defects -
another good way to learn a codebase and a more productive excersise in our
time constrained projects.

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peterhi
I'm not sure I agree with the assumption "The main problem with fear of
breaking the code is the implicit assumption that any code is really that good
to begin with."

Most of the time I work around code because it is a POS that I do not have the
time or budget to clean it up. It's fragile but it works, leave it alone until
the day it breaks and then it will move from important to urgent and budget
will become available.

