It is very common for a team to pick up a piece of software and look at what has been written and decide, it’s simply trash. People believe that it can be built better. That the tools that the legacy software was built in have been superseded and the product is no longer fit for purpose. Cynicism for what is deemed as legacy but optimism for the brave new world.
How many software products have you worked on that have been ruined by cynicism? Not just skepticism but downright cynicism. As a software tester, a large part of my role is to be a skeptic but sometimes this crosses over to cynicism. Identifying risks in code, architecture and products is helpful, dismissing ideas is not, especially as this behavior can rapidly spread. What if the team becomes cynical? How can we break out of the cycle and actually start building software?