I recently joined an organization in which I am to be one of the two new lead developers on the public website. The previous developer (who was alone) left a sizable codebase which although functional, is rigid and fragile. Normally, the saying goes "if it ain't broke don't fix it", but in this case the poor coding style and lack of documentation makes the code unreadable (to me, the other developer, and our interns) and thus require extra time when adding features, tweaking things. Both my partner and I have deemed it essential for both our mental well-being as well as necessary if the development teams are to progress on the organization's schedule.
The problem is that our boss, who is also the head of the organization (biology phD, not a developer) thinks that the last guy was brilliant, and doesn't believe that a rewrite is necessary. Both my partner and I have attempted to contact the previous developer, but to no avail - it appears that he has disappeared off the face of the earth. How do I/we convince the boss the code is in dire need of a major rewrite?
Past Action:
- We've informed our boss the code is a mess
- We've showed him the code (he responds, "what's wrong with it?")
EDIT I'm am almost completely certain a rewrite is needed. I apologize to all the non-pythonistas out there, but the code looks like this:
def index(request):
return render(request,'index.html',locals())
repeated for perhaps 20 of the 30 "view" functions in the code. For those of you who don't understand, this type of code essentially requires every member of the team to memorize what is used for each template, and makes it difficult to change the code without breaking anything. From what I could tell, the previous developer had no more than 1 year worth of experience coding, and perhaps none professionally. The code is quite buggy right now, and nobody can quite figure out where/why.
If it changes anything, this is a non-profit research organization so grabbing market share isn't that important, but since members generally stay for about a year or so (while doing their post-doc work) I think readability/ease of maintenance is probably the single largest thing we need (other than functionality).