At a nonprofit I work with, there was a series of web forms that volunteers had to go through in order to enter a bunch of data.
Volunteers have never liked this form, but it was at one point necessary to collect all this data. A decade after those forms were built, it was decided to finally spend some of our (all volunteer) engineering capacity to help streamline the process associate with those forms. So, a junior volunteer comes in, hears the groans about this form, and found out a bunch of this data was already stored in other tables (in the interim smartphones became a thing and customer intake went from completely free form to a self-service signup process). The volunteer writes a bunch of selenium code to pull data out of a few tables and use it to population about 80% of the form fields, leaving volunteers with only 20% of the original work!
Some time later the whole thing gets reviewed by an (again, volunteer) old hat staff who were around when the original form sequences was developed. Turns out we no longer needed those 20% of fields, and ofc we already had the data in the other 80%... so all the original form code was deleted,
So the forms were retired completely, the selenium code was deleted, and the original problem was solved in a strictly superior way with 0 LOC by understanding the business need and historical context.
> So the forms were retired completely, the selenium code was deleted, and the original problem was solved in a strictly superior way with 0 LOC by understanding the business need and historical context.
At a nonprofit I work with, there was a series of web forms that volunteers had to go through in order to enter a bunch of data.
Volunteers have never liked this form, but it was at one point necessary to collect all this data. A decade after those forms were built, it was decided to finally spend some of our (all volunteer) engineering capacity to help streamline the process associate with those forms. So, a junior volunteer comes in, hears the groans about this form, and found out a bunch of this data was already stored in other tables (in the interim smartphones became a thing and customer intake went from completely free form to a self-service signup process). The volunteer writes a bunch of selenium code to pull data out of a few tables and use it to population about 80% of the form fields, leaving volunteers with only 20% of the original work!
Some time later the whole thing gets reviewed by an (again, volunteer) old hat staff who were around when the original form sequences was developed. Turns out we no longer needed those 20% of fields, and ofc we already had the data in the other 80%... so all the original form code was deleted,
So the forms were retired completely, the selenium code was deleted, and the original problem was solved in a strictly superior way with 0 LOC by understanding the business need and historical context.