<story><title>It&apos;s Not Sabotage, They&apos;re Drowning</title><url>https://shermanonsoftware.com/2019/11/15/its-not-sabotage-theyre-drowning/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stickfigure</author><text>I can perhaps understand where this one is coming from:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;I refactored the code from untested and untestable, to testable with 40% test coverage. The senior architect is refusing to merge because the test coverage is to low.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;You have a piece of software running in production; even if it&amp;#x27;s poorly written and bereft of tests, your customers are satisfied. Customers (unwittingly) have already vetted this version! A rewrite, even with brilliant design and fantastic test coverage, is still more of a risk than fixing what isn&amp;#x27;t broken.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t to say that you shouldn&amp;#x27;t rewrite code, especially if it makes other improvements possible. But don&amp;#x27;t discount how high a bar new code has to reach to measure up with &amp;quot;it already works&amp;quot;. Maybe 40% is still too risky.</text></comment>
<story><title>It&apos;s Not Sabotage, They&apos;re Drowning</title><url>https://shermanonsoftware.com/2019/11/15/its-not-sabotage-theyre-drowning/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CoolGuySteve</author><text>Nobody’s better at letting better be the enemy of good than software engineers.  For some reason our culture likes to argue and nitpick over the most mundane stuff, usually missing the forest for the trees.&lt;p&gt;I’ve had jobs where the manpower spent just arguing outweighed the cost of the change significantly.  One dickhead manager I had spent weeks arguing over the acquisition of a $500 SSD.  It made me want to slap $500 down on the table just so he’d shut the fuck up already.&lt;p&gt;The only way I know to counteract it is by saying “don’t let better be the enemy of good”.</text></comment>