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At least refactoring the code can make the bug easier to find. What I hate is when I spend hours looking for a bug because I missed a single line in some documentation and misunderstood how something in the project worked, that always hurts.
“The bug is fixed, but we inadvertently created two new ones, one of which broke production because it was inexplicably not caught.”
To be fair, if the refactoring has been done well it should be now easier to fix the bug. Your walls need to be steady before you fix the roof.
Not a dev but hobbyist so maybe I’m wrong thinking this feels a little like https://youtu.be/AbSehcT19u0
Yeah that’s exactly what it is.
Honestly refactoring everything isn’t an “improvement.” More often than not it’s a sign of that developer not understanding what the code does. Which is fine if they need to do that in a new code base or are otherwise rather green. Writing code is easier than reading it, after all. However they really should stash those changes or reopen a new branch after that exploratory phase.
IMO (in general) a good bug fix makes the smallest possible change to implement said fix. Otherwise the focus is about documention of the bug if needed and some minor refactoring to improve readability, consistency, or efficency
I like the approach of when finding a bug, write a test to reproduce it, fix the bug so the test passes, next do whatever refactoring you want because you have a test passing :)
I try to always rewrite complicated code. As an example, another dev who left the team had written a program in Elixir that nobody knew or understood. I rewrote it in python (with his help, since I still had contact with him over chat). After that, everyone in the team could understand the code and we could make changes very easily to it and document it.
Another program he wrote in python was kind of complicated and we would have bugs in it that we didn’t know how to fix. So I rewrote it with a completely different architecture with focus on simplicity. And again, now everyone could just read the code and understand it.
I think many devs are writing code that is not simple to understand for others. Then rewriting it can be worth it to avoid the pain of trying to fix bugs in complicated code.
That’s only the first stage. Once you get tired enough you start writing code that not even you can understand the next morning, but which you’re loathe to change because “it just works”.
Yeah I’ve had that experience too. But sometimes I write a lot of hackish code to get it to work, and then after spend time rewriting it so it’s easy to understand. But it depends on mood. Sometimes I don’t change it because it’s complicated and it would be too much thinking required to make it better. :)
Programmers are often lazy by nature…
Lazy is right. Spending fifty hours to automate a task that doesn’t take even five minutes is commonplace.
It takes laziness to new, artful heights.
wouldn’t doing significantly more work than necessary be the opposite of laziness?
