Hello. Many times I've been in situations like these before. They are very hard on people. I learned a lot about handling complexity by design, refactoring, testing… After all that experience I decided the best way to deal with this kind of projects is by strategically replacing parts of the system until you have it under your control. Bug fixing can only take you so far.
If you depend on a system that is yours, you have to adopt a continuous improvement process and treat it like a garden… Alex Escalante Web & Mobile Development For Hire http://audelabs.com On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 7:21 PM, Scott Olmsted <[email protected]> wrote: > An insurance company started in 2009 has contacted me about fixing their > site and adding some features. The site was also started in 2009. They run > the company through this Rails site, all the back office stuff, plus some > customer-facing pages about signing up, making claims, etc. > > It's Rails 3, and it's pretty awful. 50 models with all possibly-related > code. Many fat controllers with tons of business and services logic. No > service objects or anything similar. A few tests, but they don't run. Three > or 4 Javascript libraries (Mootools!), dozens of JS and CSS files. > Bootstrap 2. Hand-made authentication. Can-can gem for authorization, but > it's not used, hundreds of lines of code for authorization are embedded in > controllers and views. Lots of jQuery, Prototype, and similar. > > They want to ditch their developers because for each of the last couple > features they tried to add, something else broke. Clearly, it would be a > huge job to bring this site up to par, but what I'm wondering is if it > wouldn't just be better to toss it and build a new site from scratch. Lift > code where possible, but build anew. > > My limited experience says that even with the best of intentions codebases > that are this bad never get fixed completely, it's just too hard to make > the business case for fixing so many things not visible to the users and > owner. > > Has anyone ever seen a decision like this? > > Thanks, > > Scott > RailsRescue.com (rescue - ha!) > > -- > -- > SD Ruby mailing list > [email protected] > http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "SD Ruby" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SD Ruby" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
