A nasty case of the departed developer bug

We have recently found a few bugs at work, I would actually say its more of a nest of bugs. The code I work on is quite split up into the core code and actions. We don’t have any code reviews or code checking and there isn’t even a demand for any unit tests.

The basic result of this is that often you don’t see other peoples code unless there is a problem with it. Two developers have left since I have worked at the company and we have recently found need to go into their code. Holy Moly there was some fine specimens of Voodoo code – it worked by magic not logic. Some of it was so confusing we have started to make a list of major refactoring that needs to be taken.

It’s funny when you see code like this because before the developer left you think they are doing a good job and to be honest most of the time they are but then sometimes you see some code that is a complete mess and wondered what they were up to at their machine all that time.

Obviously some developers have the same situation you were in and they had to try and change some legacy code and decided to leave it alone and just add a hack on. The problem with this approach is that in the end someone is going to have to fix it.

The current code I am looking at is quite amusing, I don’t understand it fully yet but there is a piece of code which says, move the map to the left and then below it a comment and code which moves the map down and then one which moves the map up. Why it is moving the map around I can’t fathom.

The best thing that occurs when Developers leave is that you can blame them for any bugs that occur, even if you put them in yourself :-D