03 March 2009

Perceived Code-base quality

Recently one of my friend was re-orged from a open-source product to a proprietary project. He was complaining about the quality of the code-base, especially about using hard-coded paths and the likes.

I have also worked on different code-bases of different quality. And I feel that not being very confident about the quality helps at times. For example, say if you work on Linux Kernel and believe that the kernel code is of highest quality. When a bug is filed, you won't be confident of finding the bug in the kernel code. So one would look elsewhere like the setup or other layers or the application or wont even trust the bug-submitter.

Wouldn't a bug-hunter be happy and confident if he believes that there are lots of bugs in the code-forest to be hunted. But at the same time, if one is planning to do agriculture(more code changes, features, clean-ups etc...) in the same code-forest, one would be worried that his crops may be destroyed by some of those bugs lurking out there. But a software engineer should be a farmer who enjoys hunting as well.

Farmer + Hunter+... == Software Engineer. Happy code farming^Wcoding and bug-hunting.

p.s: Yes it is easy to hunt that single bug if the code-base is clean. But a bad code-base could be a nightmare for the hunter. He would be hunting various other bugs in search of one. But don't you like the thrill?

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