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Jul 24README
by in Feature Articles on 2024-08-12One of the clients for Rudolf's company was getting furious with them. The dev team was in constant firefighting mode. No new features ever shipped, because the code-base was too fragile to add new features to without breaking something else. What few tests existed were broken. Anyone put on the project burned out and fled in months, sometimes weeks, and rarely after only a few days.
Rudolf wasn't too pleased when management parachuted him into the project to save it. But when he pulled the code and started poking around, it looked bad but not unsalvageable. The first thing he noticed is that, when following the instructions in the README, he couldn't build and run the application. Or maybe he wasn't following the instructions in the README, because the README was a confusing and incoherent mess, which included snippets from unresolved merges. Rudolf's first few days on the project were spent just getting it building and running locally, then updating the README. Once that was done, he started in on fixing the broken tests. There was a lot of work to be done, but it was all doable work. Rudolf could lay out a plan of how to get the project back on track and start delivering new features.