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Exploring Solution Spaces, Keith Ray's blog on Software development and other topics.
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2004.Jul.20 Tue
Eventually, every programmer has to learn to make sustainable improvements in code that maintain or improve the goodness of its design, rather than unsustainable "patching" of code, which degrades the goodness of its design.
Someone complains that members of his team are patching code instead of improving it, and therefore Extreme Programming isn't "scalable". The fact is, this lesson about the inappropriate use of "patching" is something that needs to be learned even if the team isn't doing XP. If it is doing XP, they are going to learn this lesson more quickly and more obviously than they would in a non-XP environment: their velocity is going to slow down over time until they can't create any new user-value within a single iteration. They will be forced to start refactoring ("refactoring" means improving the design of the code, not "rewriting" as many people seem to think). It seems that many if not most first-time XP teams have to learn the importance of refactoring from experience.
How do people know when a chicken or some other bird has avian flu? Does it get a runny beak? Can chickens sneeze?