Working on software with a lot of code can be a lot of fun. It can be hard to manage properly, too. Usually teams are formed to build large software projects. This is great because normally a team of developers is more productive than a single developer. However, it is crucial that all members are aware of other members’ contributions and changes to the project. I don’t want a team member to break my code, just as other team members don’t want me to break their code. It’s important for each team member to understand the effects of their code as well as the rest of their team’s code.

A couple of months ago I added tail recursion optimization to Blaise. It worked quite well for a while until a team member changed a piece of code that was completely unrelated to tail recursion and unknowing broke the tail recursion optimization. Sadly, this created more work for both of us. We have to figure out which change caused the tail recursion optimization to break and then we need to figure out how to modify the code we have. Ideally, we would have known potential side effects from changing code beforehand and we would have proactively handled them instead of finding them weeks later.