Bleach the underwear
Last night I saw sitting around a table with my extremed colleagues and someone (I know who but will not name drop or incriminate his new company) talked about his company ripping out all of the embarrassing test automation they had in place before his arrival. I blurted out “They were bleaching the underwear” which most people seemed to think was funny. Luckily everyone had finished eating.
Today I am fixing some embarrassing code on my rails app that relied on an NFS mount to a NAS bought at Fry’s. Sadly in the interest of time I may make a different stain in the underwear but I hear noise of the new location of ‘official builds’ will move again.
Since this is boring I started to think, how often should one bleach the underwear, also know as refactoring or throwing out junk, each month? 1 day, 3 days or as needed when making new stuff? If you don’t set aside time for doing it how will you measure how much time it takes to do this? Do you really need to measure this?
