Sometimes during software development you need to hack something together temporarily just to see it working. You have no intention of leaving it like that.

We recently needed to add an email field to something we’re working on. And to make sure we didn’t forget about it we made it ridiculous.

email p addy

Now it works, but we can also tell it’s not finished. And we can have a laugh about it.

There are other techniques too. You could set up a CSS class called “temporary” that throws a ugly thick purple border around things you know are temporary.

Or you could just keep a log somewhere, but we think it’s better to show the temporariness on the screen itself instead of on a piece of paper that may or may not be accurate and comprehensive.

What techniques have you used to keep ugly temporarily-necessary hacks from slipping into your final release?