Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Chapter 14: Dependencies on Libraries Are Killing Me

One thing that really helps development is code reuse. If we can buy a library that solves some problem for us (and figure out how to use it), we can often cut substantial time off a project. The only problem is that it is very easy to become over-reliant on a library. If you use it promiscuously throughout your code, you are pretty much stuck with it. Some teams I’ve worked with have been severely burned by their over-reliance on libraries. In one case, a vendor raised royalties so high that the application couldn’t make money in the marketplace. The team couldn’t easily use another vendor’s library because separating out the calls to the original vendor’s code would’ve amounted to a rewrite. ...