A Short Take about the interplay between legacy code and legacy environments.

Legacy environments get in the way of improving legacy code. Fortunately, as one improves, so does the other. Sadly, legacy environments often limit our ability to test our code changes. Even so, you’ll probably need to start by improving the code in order to make improvements to the environment possible.

Questions

What environment problems are you facing in your current project? How do these problems get in your way when you try to do work? What have you tried to do to make the situation better?

Which environment seems to hurt you more: the development environment (build tools, continuous integration tools, third-party libraries, tangled mess of projects and workspaces) or the runtime environment (deployment tools, complicated deployment “architecture”, poor operating system tools, difficulty cloning the production deployments in staging or testing)?

What code changes do you wish you could make, but don’t dare to try, due to your environment problems?