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Discussion on: Conduct Deeper Evaluations Before Taking on New Software Dependencies

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tosbourn profile image
Toby Osbourn

Great post, I particularly enjoyed;

"if you are searching for software, it pays to acknowledge the lack of correlation between aesthetics and quality of software"

One thing I would add to the list of things to consider. I've noticed a tendency for care to be taken at the start of a project, but as a project requires more and more dependencies the bar for caring seems to drop.

Sometimes it pays to consider if an additional dependency is required at all, a lot of gems and NPM packages I've seen are little more than 12 line helper methods, but when you already have 30 specified dependencies what is one more!

One thing I've done on longer running projects before is ask a more junior member of staff (who is well aware of the codebase) what each dependency does. Any they can't give a solid answer to should be evaluated for their usefulness.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Yeah. It sometimes goes in the other direction for me as well. Like, since the project has already been mostly written without dependencies, I won't even think to look for a good solution to the problem before unnecessarily doing it myself. If it's based on a pre-determined logic, that's one thing, but sometimes we just like to match previous patterns as an instinct.