Most of you have probably had to work on a dreaded legacy project. Working on that project is no fun; the code is a mess, and you want to find whoever wrote it and find out what they were thinking when they wrote it.
At some point in your career, you have been or will be that person to someone else. We all write code that we will not be proud of later. But why does the code get so bad? When does a project become legacy? Lastly, what can be done to prevent this?
In short, the code goes bad because we are afraid to change it. Why would the code not changing cause it to be bad? You would hope that, when the code was written, it was the best code that the developer was capable of producing at the time. So, that code should have been good, right? This is a complicated answer but assume, for the moment, that the code was something to be proud of when it was originally written. That still begs the question, how did it go bad?
The answer is staring you in the...