I am in the middle of a rapid software development project. There is a first demo in a few weeks, and I need to add a lot more capability between now and then.<\/p>\n
Every day I add new features, or replace old ones. Which means that every day there are opportunities for massive failure.<\/p>\n
I keep backups at each step, so failure is never catastrophic. Still, I don’t really want to lose the bulk of a day’s work by introducing some bug that will force me to go back to a previous version.<\/p>\n
So I’m adopting a kind of variation of the physician’s motto “First do no harm.” Whenever I add a new feature that will replace an older one, I keep the older feature in for a while.<\/p>\n
The idea is that everything should continue to operate exactly the way it did before I added the new code. Except now there are new things you can also do if you know how.<\/p>\n
I keep it that way until I am confident that I haven’t broken anything. Only then do I get rid of the old version of the feature. <\/p>\n
I realize that the stakes here are a lot lower than what doctors deal with every day. Still, it’s good to have a way to work that doesn’t keep breaking anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am in the middle of a rapid software development project. There is a first demo in a few weeks, and I need to add a lot more capability between now and then. Every day I add new features, or replace old ones. Which means that every day there are opportunities for massive failure. I … Continue reading “Programmum non nocere”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23388"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23389,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23388\/revisions\/23389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}