That senior dev told me to rewrite the whole module from scratch

My lead at a fintech startup in Austin kept insisting I dump our messy codebase and start over for a payment processor update. I spent 3 weeks building a replacement that broke half the integration tests. Turned out his advice was based on a five year old architecture that didn't fit our current setup. Anyone else get burned by someone's outdated "wisdom"?

2 comments

2 Comments

logan6484d ago

I got burned the same way three years ago at a credit union software shop in Ohio. A senior guy told me to scrap our loan approval module and rebuild it using an old service pattern he liked. I spent a month on it and broke the rate calculation logic that took two weeks to fix. What finally worked was sitting down with the test outputs and mapping what the new code actually needed to do versus what the old code was doing on accident. I realized the old mess had workarounds for edge cases nobody documented. Now I always ask for a list of those hidden behaviors before I touch anything.

the_wade4d ago

That hidden behavior list is gold but it's tricky because the old code might have bugs that accidentally worked for years. Something nobody mentions is asking for the test data sets too, not just the behaviors. The real kicker is when you find out the old code was doing something wrong but customers had built workarounds around the bug, so fixing it breaks their flow. I always grab the payment logs from the last six months now to spot those accidental features people rely on.