12 Aug
2008
12 Aug
'08
5:24 p.m.
In article <18593.60484.263908.741372 at chagelb-us-nash.equallogic.com>,
Paul Koning <Paul_Koning at Dell.com> writes:
Corel long ago lost any claim to software competence
that it might
ever have had. I can't think of any other software company whose
quality is anywhere near as low as that outfit.
More than likely what happened is that the employees who had the
design in their heads ceased to be employees. They quit and took the
valuable "unwritten law" of how everything worked with them. The
people who were brought on to implement new features probably had a
difficult time understanding how the existing code worked and/or were
afraid to do any serious changes on it for fear of how wrong it could
go. And of course, the application didn't have a suite of unit tests
covering all the code, so without having that internal knowledge of
the structure that comes from having written it yourself, new changes
become riskier and riskier.
See Brian Foote's excellent essay "Big Ball of Mud" on how this can
happen, even with well meaning, smart employees.
<http://www.laputan.org/mud/>
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