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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T20:25:06+00:00

What’s best practice for reuse of code versus copy/paste? The problem with reuse can

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What’s best practice for reuse of code versus copy/paste?

The problem with reuse can be that changing the reused code will affect many other pieces of functionality.

This is good & bad : good if the change is a bugfix or useful enhancement. Bad if other reusing code unexpectedly becomes broken because it relied on the old version (or the new version has a bug).

In some cases it would seem that copy/paste is better – each user of the pasted code has a private copy which it can customize without consequences.

Is there a best practice for this problem; does reuse require watertight unit tests?

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  1. Editorial Team

    So the consumer (reuser) code is dependent on the reused code, that’s right.

    You have to manage this dependency.

    It is true for binary reuse (eg. a dll) and code reuse (eg. a script library) as well.

    • Consumer should depend on a certain (known) version of the reused code/binary.

    • Consumer should keep a copy of the reused code/binary, but never directly modify it, only update to a newer version when it is safe.

    • Think carefully when you modify resused codebase. Branch for breaking changes.

    • If a Consumer wants to update the reused code/binary then it first has to test to see if it’s safe. If tests fail then Consumer can alway fall back to the last known (and kept) good version.

    So you can benefit from reuse (eg. you have to fix a bug in one place), and still you’re in control of changes. But nothing saves you from testing whenever you update the reused code/binary.

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