On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 2:38 PM, Steve D'Aprano <steve+pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Thu, 28 Sep 2017 03:56 pm, Bill wrote: > >> I worked in maintenance programming. You got the hand you were dealt! >> And you weren't allowed to "improve" the code unless the customer >> contracted you to do so. > > How do you tell the difference between a bug fix and an code improvement, if > the > behaviour of the program remains the same?
If the behaviour remains *exactly* the same, then it's a code improvement (aka a refactoring), not a bug fix. Or, looking at it another way: if there is absolutely no change to behaviour, how could you tell that there was a bug in it? And yes, trying to convince a customer that it's worth paying for improvements that don't change anything visible is hard. Which is why a lot of companies end up merely paying interest on their technical debt, and never paying off any of the capital. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
