The Four-Year Temporary Fix

A developer and a product manager review a notorious piece of legacy code in their Seattle office.

The Four-Year Temporary Fix

Listen and choose the right answer

How long has the temporary payment routing fix been running in production?

• Four years
• Two months
• Ten minutes

What is Ashley's main criticism regarding the script?

• It lacks proper documentation
• It has zero maintainability and accrues heavy debt
• It uses too much cloud memory

What happens while Ashley and Andrew are talking?

• Management approves a complete rewrite
• Dave successfully adds a currency converter
• The checkout pipeline crashes after Dave pushes a patch

What does Andrew admit about the situation at the end?

• They need to roll back the patch immediately
• He wrote the original script himself
• They should have rewritten it years ago

Listen again and complete the sentences

• Andrew: Oh, you mean that ____ script we threw together before the Series A launch?
• Ashley: Exactly that one. It's filled with ____ endpoints and completely brittle code.
• Andrew: Well, it's been running smoothly as a ____ for four years now, hasn't it?
• Ashley: We ought to have rewritten it long ago instead of letting technical debt ____ like crazy.
• Ashley: That doesn't mean it's fine! ____ is zero, and every new engineer cries when they see that cruft.

Sources: photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels