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titusjohnsonHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

- If the client finds out we did a full rewrite, they too are going to do a full regression test on …

… - If the client finds out we did a full rewrite, they too are going to do a full regression test on their end. Do you know the size of the shitstorm this is going to bring on us? Every single question, problem, feature change, bug, enhancement, communication, _everything_ we went through over the last XX years since we built this integration is going to resurface. I get re-litigate every. single. thing. "Since you're working on our integration can we get XX, XX, and XXXX?" (each is a sprints worth of dev time minimum), "YYY isn't working, did you guys break it again?" (it's always been broken but now someone gets to spend 3 hours in Datadog pulling logs to prove this). - I've been using the "Rewrite This Library" and "Refactor That Service" projects as leverage to negotiate for more budget to bring on 2 more headcount so that we could actually do those rewrites with proper time and space. You talking about getting 80% done over a weekend has completely undermined the work I've put into this effort, and at the same time didn't remove the Refactor issue from my backlog. …

Original discussionMaster the Art of the Product Manager 'No'168 source comments · at import
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SF
sfn42HN

I once worked on an application that integrated with a third party api. The way it did this was with a large and horrible client library that used a separate db to cache the data. The data was then fetched from the main application and used to rebuild the pages (in the main db) based on this data once a day. The library had lots of problems, and one day it stopped working. I was tasked with fixing it - we had the source code, it was purchased from someone and copied into the repo. I spent most of the week if not more trying to figure out what was wrong, but I couldn't. What I did learn was that this library was some of the worst most pointless code I'd ever seen. So I told the team that I think I can rebuild this thing from scratch faster than I can fix this bug. The intermediate db is pointless and most of the library code is dead, the rest is garbage. I can make a simple little thing t…

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RY
ryandrakeHN

This reply exudes professionalism and experience in the real world of development where it's not just code leaping from a developer's fingertips into prod. I was going to reply myself, but you covered nearly everything I was going to. Cowboy Coders, please read it carefully and reflect on it seriously.

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SF
sfn42HN

You have a lot of good points and some of it may have been applicable in my case. But this was not complicated. I have underestimated refactors before, this was not one of those times. This was a simple little thing, just getting some data from point A to point B. It would have been easy to verify that the new solution generated the same pages (data in db tables) as the old one. I didnt undermine anyone. I brought it up in a team meeting, I didn't take it to the department head. Sure I had been told no, but that no was based on the assumption that I was wrong about being able to replace it easily. My weekend coding was simply to prove that it could be done, which I did whether anyone believes me or not. I really like your last paragraph. You didn't just say no, you walked through it with them and helped them see the problem. I am convinced that the only real reason this did not go throug…

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CL
clcaevHN

You could also ask the developer to write comprehensive documentation and test cases, not only for the new code but also for the older code, to ensure the new one can replicate the bugs higher level systems depend upon.

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