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Google have dedicated (no more there) language, platform, library, etc. teams that can push really huge refactoring changelists - for example if they've noticed that code had plenty of: "if (someString == null || someString.empty())" - they would replace it with something simpler. Or if they've found some bad pattern, would pull it too. I do remember when certain java hash map was replaced, and they replaced it across. It broke some tests (that were relying on specific orders, and that was wrong) - and people quickly jumped and fixed them. This level of coordination is great. And it's nost just, let's do it today - things are prepared in advance, days, weeks, months and years if it had to. With careful rollout plans, getting everyone aware, helping anyone to get to their goal, etc. It's also easy to establish code style guides, and remove the bikeshedding of tabs/spaces, camel braces or not, swtich/case statement styles, etc. Once a tool has been written to reformat (either IDE, or other means), and another to check style, some semantics - then people like it or not soon get on that style and keep going. There are more important things to discuss than it. |