At one point or other, a software developer will be tasked with inheriting another developer’s code. Less experienced developers will not have a clue what’s in store for them, and more experienced developers already know it’s like playing Russian roulette. Ideally, the prior developer did a reasonably good job with writing clean code (not perfect, but clean) and hopefully some inline comments clarifying the more complex, mission critical parts of the solution.

The level of tech debt the inheritors encounter will depend in large part on the age of the code base, which is a key factor in what’s called software rot. Software rot is the idea that, like any other tangible product, software decays over time. The rate of decay accelerates if the code is not continuously updated and deployed. This means there are two categories of inherited code:

Fresh Code

Stale Code

Fresh code will often have the latest libraries and frameworks in place. Hopefully, they follow the latest best practices for mobile and web development. Code written in the modern era of MVC and microservices will likely be reasonably clean enough to understand without much documentation. Stale code, on the other hand, runs the risk of being out of touch with the latest best practices. Code written, say, 15 years ago will have big monolithic services (early SOA era) and some fat UI clients. Infrequently updated code are not as bad as code that has not been updated in a decade or longer. Following DevOps processes ensures the code stays fresh and is easier to inherit.

Read the rest on Medium.com!