When is it too late to change? When do you go back and change the design so that it’s more correct and more efficient rather than just leaving the code as it is in its working state? When do you go back and change all the controls so that they’re consistent rather than just leaving them as they are? When do you go back and fix the spaghetti code and when do you just let things continue to work?

I like things to be consistent throughout all my code and all my screens. I don’t like duplicated code. Sometimes at work I take things a bit too far and I go through all the code and change these things even though it may not be the most important thing at the moment.

Although there’s definitely a fine line on when you should do this. It’s a balancing act between what you get back and the time it takes to make the change. ROI, baby. Usually if I can make the change in about a day, it’s something that will help the overall design and if there’s low risk that my change will cause any bugs or failures then I’ll just make the change and be done with it.

But if the change isn’t particularly that important, then however much I feel the need to make the dialogs more consistent or to make all the classes use the same set of functionality then I try to restrain myself.

…So when do you make the change and when do you just let things be?