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Fri, Jul 17, 2009 7:20 EDT
Refactoring dilemmas
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Posted by: jlipton in Best Practices Topic: Development
Current Rating: |
Refactoring the code base for a product is always a difficult decision.
From a business perspective:
- it's expensive
- it takes a long time
- you get nothing from it other than promises of things being better down the track
Developers wil produce arguments along the lines of:
- the current code is a mess
- maintenance is difficult
- it's hard to understand
- if we knew now what we did then we'd have done it differently from the outset
- there is no elegance
I always think long and hard about any large code refactor - smaller refactors I encourage. Martin Fowler of Extreme Programming fame is one of the refactoring gurus and he recommends refactoring often and mercilessly. See here.
Why am I resistant to large code refactors?
- it's harder to understand existing code than it is to rewrite it from scratch. This creates developer bias.
- it's expense and can be bad for the business. You gain little in the short term and you can in fact lose by introducing new issues.
- why do we think that refactoring will necessarily make things better?
- the old codebase may be messy but it works....
- what are we gaining from the refactor - can we measure it?
- often you're actually going backwards and at a cost.
- does it need to be done all at once or can it be done incrementally?
- is the real problem lack of understanding or documentation with the existing codebase?
Here's a link to an interview with Joel Spolsky who also shares strong, similar code refactoring views. It refers to one of the best examples of a code refactor that went horribly wrong that of Netscape version 5 - the version that never happened.
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