Yep, when fear creeps in around modifying a part of an application it is time to have a very serious conversation about fixing that. It is one of the few cases where I find the refactor vs. creating customer value argument is more clear cut -- letting that fear linger is likely to spread to other parts of the code & turns into a human problem pretty fast.
Fixing might be a presentation, tests, documentation, refactoring, rewrite, deprecation, whatever. Just don't let it languish and the fear grow.
Fixing might be a presentation, tests, documentation, refactoring, rewrite, deprecation, whatever. Just don't let it languish and the fear grow.