I worked on an enterprisey line of business app that assigned sales leads to salespeople.
The algorithm to do this was a multi-step process that was (1) rather complex (2) constantly being tweaked (3) very successful (4) contained a number of weighting factors that were utterly arbitrary even to veterans of this app.
It was full of many `if country_code==KERPLAKISTAN && day_of_week==MONDAY` -style weighting factors. Each represented some hard-won experience And when I say "hard-won" I mean "expensive" -- generating leads is expensive business.
We had a strong culture of informative commit messages, but this file had hundreds if not thousands of commits over the years.
It was the kind of code that resisted serious refactoring or a more streamlined design because it was a recipient of frequent change requests.
A few human-readable comments here and there went a loooong way toward taming the insanity and allowing that module to be worked on by developers besides the original author.
Knowing the why for many of these rules made it much easier to work with, and also allowed developers to be educated about the business itself.
I worked on an enterprisey line of business app that assigned sales leads to salespeople.
The algorithm to do this was a multi-step process that was (1) rather complex (2) constantly being tweaked (3) very successful (4) contained a number of weighting factors that were utterly arbitrary even to veterans of this app.
It was full of many `if country_code==KERPLAKISTAN && day_of_week==MONDAY` -style weighting factors. Each represented some hard-won experience And when I say "hard-won" I mean "expensive" -- generating leads is expensive business.
We had a strong culture of informative commit messages, but this file had hundreds if not thousands of commits over the years.
It was the kind of code that resisted serious refactoring or a more streamlined design because it was a recipient of frequent change requests.
A few human-readable comments here and there went a loooong way toward taming the insanity and allowing that module to be worked on by developers besides the original author.
Knowing the why for many of these rules made it much easier to work with, and also allowed developers to be educated about the business itself.