Pruning

I spent the past few hours pruning the trees along my property line--mostly across the line on the neighbor's side, but they've grown in and through my fences, and developed into quite a thicket along the property line. The bushes acted as a lower story for the trees which are planted along the line, and looked quite nice; I didn't realize what a mess they'd become. Once I started, I realized they were choking out the bases of the big trees, and had become infested with a mess of thorny vines which had bound the whole thing together into a green mass of dead limbs and vine. Now that they're trimmed back, the trees look nicer, and the edges of my lawn are free to grow; in 2 weeks, I now realize, it will look a lot nicer than it has in the past couple of years.

In my project work, I regularly come across thickets of choked code which is hard to read and even harder to update. I fixed a bug yesterday which should've take an hour to fix, but took almost 12 hours, because I had to write a 2 new unit test suites, making sure to cover all the old code. That took about 10 hours; then the last 2 were spent brutally pruning and finally, fixing the bug. What's left is small and tight, and will be a lot easier to maintain, since it has a nice suite of unit tests.

It's easy to let the thicket grow. It's also easy to write tests while the classes are still small, and keep them up to date as the code evolves. Then, when a class does turn into a thicket, it can be pruned quickly and with authority, because the tests are already there.