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huddo121 | 9 years ago

As someone that has spent the last two years migrating legacy code, I can assure you, you do find bugs in legacy code.

I've seen bugs that user's don't notice.

I've seen bugs that user's have just gotten used to.

I've seen bugs where that failures it caused were dismissed as the system being a bit temperamental, for many years.

I've seen bugs that financially affected thousands of customers, and remained unnoticed over the course of several years.

I've even seen bugs that only remained because, by luck, the preconditions to trigger it had not been met.

I can assure you, you do find bugs in legacy code.

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taneq|9 years ago

And yet, by fixing any one of those, you'll probably break something else. Something that relies on the broken behaviour, or 'corrects' it.

Any bug in a large codebase that's older than a certain point becomes a feature. ;)

erikpukinskis|9 years ago

> And yet, by fixing any one of those, you'll probably break something else.

That's an empirical claim and I doubt it's true. Sure, sometimes you'll break something else, but 50% of the time plus? I'm gonna need to see some evidence.