Software refactoring is a survival need

Aliénor Latour
Nerd For Tech
Published in
4 min readFeb 27, 2021

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When a project starts, nobody really knows what it will be

You wake up in a sweat. It is the middle of the night. What happened?

You were dreaming. Nightmaring, to be precise. Your project, your baby, your life for the past months, totally crashed. Developers quitting, your excellent features impossible to deliver, your clients unhappy.

What happened? What did you miss?

I’ll tell you what. You missed the PAINFUL REFACTORING of DEATH.

A little software theory

When a project starts, nobody ever really knows what it will be. It is part of our job, as developers, to learn as we go along, remake, rearrange, learn and improve.

It is therefore logical to see that a software project, any project, goes through 3 unskippable phases:

  1. Quick-started version
  2. The Painful Refactoring of Death
  3. Maturity

First, you want something minimalist that will be useful as quickly as possible, so that you don’t drown before launch. Project managers are under too much pressure. Developers must merge yesterday. QA people wonder why they’re even here and cry in their sleep because you need to deliver before you get any chance to test.

Debt is accumulated, until the project reaches this critical tipping point.

At this stage, any software faces a decision: refactor, or die.

When making something, most of the work is invisible. Making tools, sorting pieces…

How to spot it in time

If you’re lucky, you are already running in production.

To achieve this, you have accumulated so much technical debt that most of the developers’ time is dedicated to workarounds and patches.

Look for the clues:

  • Your team double their estimation for any new feature of bug fix
  • Nobody ever trusts what they merge anymore. A single line may very well break the entire system. When you say “test coverage”, everyone looks out the window whistling
  • Newcomers are told to never touch this central part of the code, nor that one, and maybe not this one either. Onboarding is difficult.
  • People start to quit, as working on this is just too painful

How to survive it

First and foremost, the team will know. They will complain and tell you.

In case you don’t want to listen or they all left already, here are some ideas on where to pay your debt first:

  • Test coverage. Make sure that what works keeps working. Add unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end suites, and be clever about it. Testing is a craft and some people are very good at it. Never, please, never consider that testing is just plain common sense and could be done by anyone with a brain; there is more.
  • Simplicity. You really like this fancy feature that nobody ever uses: either cut it out or make it useful. You like having 45 ways of doing one thing. Keep only the best.
  • Bring back consistency. Technical interests on debt usually include some inconsistencies. We try one way, try another, improve the first, merge the two and after 6 or 7 tries we have something we like. But we also have 7 different versions out there.
  • Documentation. While you are writing documentation, you will see what lacks in the above ideas. If you cannot describe what a thing does in one sentence, then that thing needs rework: get rid, split, simplify,…
You’ll make it eventually

How to avoid it altogether

You are starting a new project and want to avoid this difficult phase? Invest.

Most projects cannot afford such a luxury. Making clean things requires time and money you don’t have when you start.

That said, keep in mind that the Painful Refactoring will befall you, whether you want it or not, generally at the least practical moment. Make room for it, prepare for it, give your teams room for continuous improvement. Listen to their ideas and complaints.

Conclusion

Making software means trying things and improving them, then coming back to make them better. Refactoring does not bring direct value to the clients — it brings sanity to the teams, quality to the product, stability and then faster development and easier maintenance.

Go back to sleep but don’t forget when you wake up: this is your last chance to act.

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Nerd For Tech
Nerd For Tech

Published in Nerd For Tech

NFT is an Educational Media House. Our mission is to bring the invaluable knowledge and experiences of experts from all over the world to the novice. To know more about us, visit https://www.nerdfortech.org/.

Aliénor Latour
Aliénor Latour

Written by Aliénor Latour

CTO at Skipr, co-author of Learning Go with Pocket-Sized projects. Wants to learn from wide diversity. White, cis, abled, French.

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