I'm and entry-level developer straight out of college. I am the only developer at this company.
I feel the challenges I face are different to most people working with sub optimal or very poorly written code, because I am not only not part of a team, but also entry-level, and have no documentation, or tests.
I've been tasked with updating a piece of software' it's a Windows Forms Application. I was handed a flash drive with a folder of source code. I set up git and GitHub so that I have version control and cloud backup. It was coded in VB.NET (I was told that the code was in C# when I interviewed for the job and was hired) Fortunately I've learned VB.NET quite quickly. The code is not at all modular or well structured. The majority of the program is just one ENORMOUS class (well over 2,300 lines of code) with almost no comments.
There is also only one function. The majority of the code relies on sub procedures that rely on their side effects (i.e. they manipulate external variables) while members of the form's class, these are effectively global variables. It is not a logical "class" but instead an entire program dumped into a class.
the software is meant to interact with a datalogger called an 8832 which is produced by ESC. The software I work with also interfaces with a device that was not designed to work with any software other than the proprietary software that they manufacturer sells licenses for separately. Therefore I have no manual do easily decipher what the strings of characters it spits out mean. so far I have figured out that "@" followed by two digits and a minus sign followed by more digits is an error code, until you reach "$$"
I have a fair bit of freedom as to how I go about things as I am the only developer who can work on this type of software at this company. Understanding how things have been implemented is difficult due to the lack of comments and the way things are organized (all over the place)
I am starting to understand how certain things have been done, however, I feel that working on making changes will be difficult due to hard coding and bad organization. I could propose to re-write the software, but that would take a very long time. I think my best recourse is to deal with the bad code for now, while putting in time on the side (during work hours of course) to start slowly rebuilding the code.]
This program could be so simple, clean, and reliable, but the coding of the previous contract developer has left it difficult to work with, buggy, hard to develop and build on, and very hard to test. Its hard to debug due to the lack of functions that return values. having threaded code with many procedures manipulating shared variables is messy.
I was not provided with any tests, therefore I need to find out what output the datalogger gives, see what the original software produces, and then use that as tests for when I start making changes to the software.
Should I proceed as planned? I feel that this way, I get stuff done while also making future larger projects possible. (The current code would need to be altered beyond recognition for some of the longer term projects to be possible.
The other option is to say "let's waste no time on this version and re-write the code now" Then the company gets no updates of the software for months.
