CodeSOD: Legacy Documentation

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The Daily WTF

Vernice inherited a legacy web app. By “legacy” in this case, we mean “lots of jQuery.” jQuery everywhere. Nested callbacks of HTTP requests, no separation of concerns at all, just an entire blob of spaghetti code that was left out on the counter and is now stuck together as a big blob of sauceless starch. And as for documentation? There isn’t any. No technical documentation. No comments. The code didn’t even pretend to be self-documenting.

For the past few months, Vernice has been tasked with adding features. This generally meant that she’d find the code she thought was responsible for that section of the app, change something, see nothing happen, realize she was looking at the wrong module, try that three more times, finally find the actual code that governed that behavior, but as it turns out it had downstream dependents which broke.

Adding a single textbox to a form

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