3 Bad Software Engineering Practices I’ve Seen
So far I’ve had an excellent experience in the software field compared to some of the horror stories. However, no matter how good things are you’re going to come across some bad practices/poor choices made. Choices aren’t intentional and were made under different circumstances, but the practice is still bad. I’ll dive into 3 of them that really stood out to me throughout my short career.
1. Copy, Paste and Modify Code
First time seeing this I was shocked, but totally understandable how this occurs. At school everyone was taught not to copy and paste code, instead change the code to work with both scenarios instead of copying and modifying the one piece that changes. However, in actual practice sometimes the case isn’t obvious or other things like due dates end up popping up. Sometimes when rushing a project a developer might do this unintentionally (or intentionally in certain cases) to finish up code instead of properly refactoring the function for reuse. Try to rush a due date and you’ll make a ton of mistakes like this.
A second reason you’ll find this is in old code that was written by non-developers. In several companies engineers in different fields will wear different hats to write code. A simple script running on hourly in a EC2 instance might get out of hand, and needs to be passed off…
