In the recent death march project, I was responsible a large block of inherited code. I don't mean inherited in the object oriented sense. I mean that the code was written by a different office and transferred to our office for use in the project. The intention was that by reusing the original code we could save time against building the module ourselves and help to meet the project schedule.
We would be using the inherited code using a slightly different workflow than the original deployment. Also we were switching the environment from Windows server to Solaris. Since it's Java it didn't need to be modified for platform.
Unfortunately in testing there were a some problems in the inherited code. I had to pull some all-nighters to fix some issues. hint: with servlet you need to be really careful about thread safety. hint2: well placed source comments can greatly assist someone who is not the original developer who may be maintaining your code in the future.
So it goes. Hard experience gained. Going forward we now have a track record from that office and if a future situation like this arises then can know what to expect and can better plan for how to deal with it.
It may be that every line of code you write is a liability. However every line of code you inherit from outside sources is a risk. In general, deal with widely used sources that have a good reputation like Apache. Whether internal from your organization or external from the Internet, be careful of code from previously unused sources. Be aware of the risk that the code will not perform as expected. Integrate it early, to allow the most time for testing and to deal with problems which may occur.
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