Comment Killed a project by ordering a code audit (Score 1) 377
I was brought onto a small web startup project as a co-lead. By this time the project was already 2.5 years old and had been rewritten at least three times by progressively less lousy developers. The final iteration was built on CodeIgniter (MVC framework), a decent choice in 2013.
My first day I'm browsing the codebase to see what's what, and a grep finds something like "UPDATE my_table set foo=" . $_POST['bar']. Not in a controller... not in a model... in a view.
So I immediately told the other leads that we needed to do a security audit on the entire codebase; it took a few days for the owners to consent. The audit revealed three different mechanisms for database queries (the standard CI driver and two other crude home-grown libraries, all used inconsistently) and that one of the devs, who not conicidentally had resisted the audit, was actually AFK for 20%-50% of the hours he billed every week. It took two months to do the audit and resolve the redundant code (no one was full time, mind you). Finally the owners told us "give us two weeks to decide whether or not we want to proceed". After six weeks of silence they pulled the plug and abandoned it entirely.