Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Chapter 7: It Takes Forever to Make a Change

How long does it take to make changes? The answer varies widely. On projects with terribly unclear code, many changes take a long time. We have to hunt through the code, understand all of the ramifications of a change, and then make the change. In clearer areas of the code, this can be very quick, but in really tangled areas, it can take a very long time. Some teams have it far worse than others. For them, even the simplest code changes take a long time to implement. People on those teams can find out what feature they need to add, visualize exactly where to make the change, go into the code and make the change in five minutes, and still not be able to release their change for several hours.

Let’s ...