Monday, March 19, 2007

Refactoring or Redesign?

If you ever worked on a software that has grown organically over time, you will agree that many candidates for refactoring can be found in it. These are identified as pain points, smells or simply things that suck. The reason is that as the software grows, requirements change and code needs to adapt in order to support these changes.

JIRA is not an exception. JIRA team will spend around 30 hours in each eight week release cycle on refactoring of existing code, improving design, making it easier to extend the current code base with new features. At the iteration planning meeting last week, my colleagues and I were discussing how to spend this time in the most efficient way, debating what is refactoring and what is not. One of my colleagues raised a question: "Is is refactoring or redesign?"

The answer is: "It's both."

According to The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master written by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

At its heart, refactoring is redesign. Anything that you or others on your team designed can be redesigned in light of new facts, deeper understandings, changing requirements, and so on. But if you proceed to rip up vast quantities of code with wild abandon, you may find yourself in a worse position that when you started.

Clearly, refactoring is an activity that needs to be undertaken slowly, deliberately, and carefully. Martin Fowler offers the following simple tips on how to refactor without doing more harm than good:

  1. Don't try to refactor and add functionality at the same time.
  2. Make sure you have good tests before you begin refactoring. Run the tests as often as possible. That way you will know quickly if your changes have broken anything.
  3. Take short, deliberate steps: move a field from one class to another, fuse two similar methods into a superclass. Refactoring often involves making many localized changes that result in a larger-scale change. If you keep your steps small, and test after each step, you will avoid prolonged debugging.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

good points.

its important to remember though that refactoring is a way to achieve large scale redesign in a way that preserves at all times the functionality of the system. refactoring is a process for achieving redesign:

refactoring == redesign

but this is not symmetric:

redesign != refactoring

Unknown said...

Good point, Jed!

The way I understand it is that refactoring is a means to redesign. In other words, refactoring is a way and redesign is a destination. Redesign can be also reached via other means, not necessarily involving refactoring.


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