Andy Brownsword thinks about successful code:
A common time to revisit old code is when something breaks. I was contemplating Pat’s question this week when a field length change had caused a truncation issue in an old SSIS data flow. Some code doesn’t age badly because it’s wrong, but because it didn’t expect to fail.
It’s all too easy to write a piece of code which ‘does the thing’, run a few variant tests, and send it on its way. But will it stand the test of time? That’s where my good and bad code diverge, and I usually revisit the code and find the old milk.
Admittedly, I’m not as good at this as I should be either. It can be a challenge to think through the possible issues that could arise and develop code to mitigate or eliminate those issues. But as Andy points out, it can be critical to success.