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Comment by raizer88 | Hacker News Reader

Every time something like this has been done on my company I follow up with the question: did anyone watched the code to see if the business logic is the same between the two versions? The answer is: but but but automated testing.

Followup question: did anyone read the automated test suite?

Silence.

The software rewrite is shelved.

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Honest question: does that even remotely matter, or is it an outdated prior? All software has bugs.

The goal and objective is to deliver value for your user/customers; to the speed, reliability, and assurance requirements your market segment expects.

All software has bugs, but right now you have a legacy product in production that works, then you have a rewrite that nobody tested. Do you accepted the risk to yolo it?

Sometimes the risk is acceptable, sometimes it's not.

> to the speed, reliability, and assurance requirements your market segment expects.

I suspect that the average Cisco customer expects a bit more stability than $RANDOM_SAAS.

I worked with Cisco products over 30 years, I don't expect much from experience.

Every time somebody rewrote code in my company, my questions were more on the line of "why did you preserve all the known bugs and incoherences?"

The answer is always that the rewrite was bug-compatible on purpose, the bugs were to be fixed later on the more tractable system. Every time development was abandoned right away, because there was no gain in using the new system.

Ok but what’s the alternative? Owning a piece of software nobody understands or knows how to maintain?

I’ll take the system written in a language that people can maintain and fix

The alternative is spending money on AI and spending money on someone reviewing the code. But the last one is an hard sell

The self-driving bus factor.

> did anyone watched the code to see if the business logic is the same between the two versions?

Why not just ask the coding assistant?

also take the money saved on engineering and just run two systems in parallel for a year

Yup. And its always garbage as result

Not if you have a good harness. Docs and tests first

Why do people doing a rewrite need to have read the tests?

If you have good test coverage, and the tests are reliable, then what's the problem?

If your engineering culture is bad already and you don't have good test coverage or they're flaky or whatever then that is different. If that is the case, it is probably from smart-ass attitudes like yours asking these "clever" rhetorical questions to derail people trying to improve things that led it to be like that. Do everyone a favour and keep your mouth shut and let people fix things.

The tests aren't reliable if the entire codebase was rewritten, including the tests, and then nobody read the tests.

> [if] the tests are reliable

Reading the tests is meant to check that.

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