Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

The parts you delete aren't left over. They've been deleted. Do you test the parts of your code left behind after refactoring? Yes, absolutely.

Code is either working correctly, and verified to be such by automatic testing, or it's not there. You don't leave unused code lying around to be removed later!




Right, and they were deleted. The code was not there after the refactoring. Except that because they were using an incremental deployment it was not actually removed from one of the servers. It was not really a case of untested software being run, but rather one of the servers running an older version of the software due to a deployment failure. The newer version repurposed the Power Peg flag, but since that one server was still running an older version of the code it behaved differently. It carried out the old behavior, which was not suitable for the current environment.

This is the biggest argument in my opinion against incremental deployment: it is hard to know exactly what is on any given box. Each time you push an incremental piece to a server you have effectively created a completely unique and custom version of the software on that server. Much better to package the entire solution and be able to say with certainty, "Server A has build number 123."




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: