Donald Belcham on Brownfield Development
In this audio interview, Donald Belcham discusses brownfield development, technical debt, and some useful tools for developers.
Be sure to read Donald’s article “Working with Brownfield Code“.
Donald Belcham on Brownfield Development [12:54m]: Working with Brownfield Code
During our careers as developers we sit in training courses, conference sessions and vendor demos in which we hear about how easy and great technology XYZ is for creating applications. And almost every one of them assumes that we’re working on new development. I’m not sure about you, but I find that new (or greenfield) application development has been fairly rare in my career.
More often than not, we developers are working in companies that already have a suite of custom software. If you’re brought in to work on a specific project, it’s rare that the project hasn’t had something already started on it. As a result, most developers spend a large part of their careers working with or on someone else’s code. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Instead I think that it is something that we should embrace with good practices, strong tooling and a strong desire to succeed.