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Friday, June 21, 2013

Don't let 'best' be the enemy of 'better'

Don't let 'best' be the enemy of 'better'.

This quote from Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael C. Feathers is aimed at developers who are trying to work with and improve old, complex, bloated code bases. These monolithic systems are so big and tangled that addressing one small problem within it can raise a bunch of other issued. I have often seen developers stuck on a problem not because they could not think of a way to solve it, but because they could not find the perfect way to solve it. Perfection is an admirable goal, but rarely immediately achievable. Something that is always achievable though is the direction of perfection.  Even if we can't make something the best, there must be a way to make it better. Eventually, after iterations of becoming better, it might become the best, or maybe it won't. But inactivity is one way to ensure that the situation never improves.

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