January 15, 2010

How to work with the preexisting project

This is not an official guide, this is just from my personal experience.

In a preexisting project there are some point to consider:
  • In the first time or even after a while, for me learning the workflow is the hardest part especially when the project is vast(It's not your style of coding so it will take some time to understand it).
  • When you made a change, then consider this:
    • If you made an addition to the code, then you must focus on that part or the workflow that will be affected by that.
    • If you made an edit or delete to the code, then you must find all part that would be deleted(for example, do a grep) and make sure that the change won't affect other part to become a defect.
    • Always talk or discuss with other team member or client whenever possible, with this you can learn others mindset about this project, this is could also help you to understand the code faster.
    • Don't too easily judge the existing code is bad or wrong, sometimes there is a good reason/explanation behind it.
    • Don't forget to try to understand the client better, because it directly or indirectly, our client will compare with the previous one.

    I hope this could be a help to someone.

    3 comments:

    1. Nice post Gus!
      In my experience, adding code is safe, but editing or deleting, you have to 'grep' and make sure everything will run fine, especially if no complete unit test present :)

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    2. Hi Agus,

      Nice post.
      But after you do "grep" after edit or delete code, you should run unit test and if no unit test in project you must to create a new one.( I recomended rspec or cucumber ).
      Yes, you'll need extra time, but it'll save your live someday, trust me ! :-)

      Best,
      Feby

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    3. Thank you for your comments.

      In my opinion, adding code isn't entirely safe everytime, don't forget about the consistency and performance. In some cases we usually forget about those two.

      I agree about the test, the test is needed to reduce time when recheck the code after made any changes.

      And there is a blog about how important the tests are.
      Just visit this blog: http://davidangga.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/testing-your-apps/.

      ReplyDelete