You should not be afraid to change code

If you ever work on code and are afraid to change a part of it because it might break, you’ve got a serious problem on your hands.  If you are afraid to change code, that means you’re afraid to improve code.  That means you can’t make it better and you can’t add features to it.  Living in fear is no way to live.

If someone ever says, “don’t touch it” in regards to code, that means someone screwed up a long time ago and now everyone at the company has to pay the price.  The code is holding your productivity hostage.  There are so many ways you’d like to improve the code in your project, but your changes keep on getting tangled up with this knot of instability.

This is not the natural order of things.  Just because a project lives long enough doesn’t mean that there has to be fragile pieces of code that break if you look at it wrong.  It’s just that so much technical debt has added up around the code that someone should have dealt with it a long time ago.  Now, nobody wants to deal with it.  If you or your company is afraid to change a piece of code, “you’re doing it wrong”.  Here’s how you can fix this problem:

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