[temporallobe]

Yes, but…I suppose you have to pick your battles. There was recently a problem vexing me about a Rails project I maintain where the logs were filled with complaints about “unsupported parameters”, even though we painstakingly went through all the controllers and allowed them. It’s /probably/ benign, but it adds a lot of noise to the logs. Several of us took a stab at resolving it, but in the end we always had much higher priorities to address. Also it’s hard to justify spending so many hours on something that has little “business value”, especially when there is currently no functional impact.

It’s a nuisance issue sorta like hemorrhoids. Do you get the surgery and suffer weeks of extreme pain, or do you just deal with it? Hemorrhoids are mostly benign, but certainly have the potential to become more severe and very problematic. Maybe this phenomenon should be called digital hemorroids?

[brirec]

As someone with pretty bad hemorrhoids, I’m hesitant to ask my doctor about surgery because I’ve been told the hemorrhoids will come back, without question. So it’s even still just a temporary fix…

[imtringued]

Surgery for hemorrhoids sounds like trying to cure the symptom.

There is something going wrong in your body that has hemorrhoids as a downstream effect. Surgery can't fix the root cause.

If you have constipation then consider the following: the large intestine has bacteria that process your undigested food and this can have many nasty consequences. What is going wrong in the small intestine that leads to this?

[colechristensen]

Couldn’t you just run a debugger to find all of the incidents of that issue?

[temporallobe]

We’ve been down many paths on this. In some cases we know exactly where it’s happening, but despite configuring everything correctly, it still complains. It might just be a bug in the Rails code or a fault in the way parameters are passed in (some of the endpoints take a lot of parameters, some of them optional). We could “fix” the issue by simply allowing all parameters, but of course this opens a security risk. This is a 10+ year old code base and I am told it has been a thorn in their side for a long time. It’s one of those battles thar I suppose we are not going to try fighting unless we get really bored and have nothing else to work on.

[bornfreddy]

Also, stack trace should show you everything you need to know to fix this, or am I missing something? (no experience with Ruby)

Otherwise, I see the cleanups and refactoring as part of normal development process. There is no need to put such tasks in Jira - they must be done as preparation for the regular tasks. I can imagine that some companies take agile too seriously and want to micromanage every little task, but I guess lack of time for refactoring is not the biggest problem.

[colechristensen]

"why don't you just" comments are easy :) (I made one)

debugging in codebases with a lot of magic (rails) is hard. it can be very difficult to follow calls around unless you're quite the expert. certain styles of programming really frustrate me, but then again I program like a scientist so the kinds of things I'm prone to do frustrate software engineers (for loops nested 8 deep, preference for single character variables, etc.)

[temporallobe]

You’re spot-on with the “magic” of Rails. While it can be very powerful and feature-rich, it can feel like a black box at times and stack traces aren’t always accurate or helpful. To be fair, this happens with a lot of library-heavy frameworks though, Spring Boot being a prime example of this.