What is the/Is there a right way to tell management that our code sucks?
- by Azkar
Our code is bad. It might not have always been considered bad, but it is bad and is only going downhill. I started fresh out of college less than a year ago, and many of the things in our code puzzle me beyond belief. At first I figured that as the new guy I should keep my mouth shut until I learned a little more about our code base, but I've seen plenty to know that it's bad.
Some of the highlights:
We still use frames (try getting something out of a querystring, almost impossible)
VBScript
Source Safe
We 'use' .NET - by that I mean we have .net wrappers that call COM DLLs making it almost impossible to debug easily
Everything is basically one giant function
Code is not maintainable. Each page has multiple files that are created every time a new page is made. The main page basically does Response.Write() a bunch of times to render the HTML (runat="server"? no way). After that there can be a lot of logic on the client side (VBScript), and finally the page submits to itself (often time storing many things in hidden fields) where it then posts to a processing page which can do things such as save the data to the database.
The specifications we get are laughable. Often times they call for things like "auto-populate field X with either field Y or field Z" with no indication of when to choose field Y or field Z.
I'm sure some of this is a result of not being employed at a software company, but I feel as if people writing software should at least care about the quality of their code. I can't even imagine that if I were to bring something up that anything would be done soon, as there is a large deadline looming, but we are continuing to write bad code and use bad practices.
What can I do? How do I even bring these issues up? 75% of my team agree with me and have brought up these issues in the past, yet nothing gets changed.
