| > A better metric for deciding where you should focus the most effort on code quality is not frequency of modification Frequency of modification is an excellent predictor though: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... and efforts to get good predictions out of attestations of quality have so far have not been able to make as good predictions as that for sure. > Code that never needs to be touched is fine. Although the odds are that such code is either completely trivial or subtly wrong (or both). I'm not convinced of this: I think the longer code lives, the easier it is to convince myself it's probably correct (or at least, correct from the business perspective). Can you explain how you get your odds? > The changes you really need to worry about are to code nobody has touched for 3 years and whoever wrote it no longer works for the company. Especially if that code was written with the mindset of "nobody will ever care about this code". I think this is predicated on whether that code needs to be changed at all: You said you think it's likely it will need to be changed, but I don't see why you think that. |