Comments on: Profiling a legacy app

By: Wayne

Wayne — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:37:10 +0000

Actually, complaining about the code is only helpful when the original developer is there to overhear your frustration and perhaps learn a little something-something. It just isn’t socially acceptable, perhaps, but then I feel we are missing out on the benefits of public humiliation as a society…

I’ve written some crap code, as all developers have at one point. To me, the developers that can rise above the crap code and actually get something done without their complaining slowing them down can complain all day long for all I care.

Complaining can be theraputic, no?

I groan in the instances where you cannot create a staging or test server. Good times there…

By: Whatever

Whatever — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:07:58 +0000

“The biggest one is the complaining. Many very successful systems are built with duck tape and baling wire. It’s rather pointless to vilify an application or system that’s netted a company millions of dollars. Lack of structure or tests might be bogging down the company now, but it’s put a lot of food on people’s tables.”

Amen, brother. I’m pragmatic if anything and I cringe when I hear developers who are pulling down six figures bitch and moan about the condition of the code that is responsible for paying their hefty paychecks.

By: Jimmy Bogard

Jimmy Bogard — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:35:55 +0000

@Steve

Thanks, yeah there are definitely some columns to filter out what you’re looking at. In one case, we had all calls going through remoting objects on an application server, so there was literally no way to distinguish our calls from others. Nearly all of the time there is some unique information though, whether it’s process ID, login account, machine name etc.

By: Steve Campbell

Steve Campbell — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:12:15 +0000

Excellent advice, thanks.

Regarding sql profiler, you can limit your profiling to a particular processid – then it does not matter if others are using the app.

By: terry

terry — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:02:07 +0000

This was awesome:
“The biggest one is the complaining. Many very successful systems are built with duck tape and baling wire. It’s rather pointless to vilify an application or system that’s netted a company millions of dollars. Lack of structure or tests might be bogging down the company now, but it’s put a lot of food on people’s tables.”

And I totally agree. Complaining allows the bar for improvement to be lowered and “justified,” but really it’s just a way to avoid really examining the problems. It’s a lot easier to blame it on “oh their code is fragile; this is undoable.”

I’m also convinced now that patching legacy code without the original developers to be one of the hardest jobs there is.

By: Joey Beninghove

Joey Beninghove — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:11:34 +0000

Good stuff Jimmy. I’m in this exact situation at the moment working in a mostly untested codebase and it is easy to get overwhelmed. Another thing I’m doing right now is taking some advice from Michael Feathers and writing some “characterization” tests against a particular (huge) class before I start making changes to it. Doing this can help to understand the existing behavior much more and act as good documentation in the future.