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by cratermoon 1074 days ago
On the flip side, if nearby things are never updated to match changing understanding of the system, then very shortly the code will be cluttered with possibly dozens of different styles: multiple naming conventions, constants in some places, hard-coded values in others, and values read from a parameter file in others, and other kinds of variations. The result will be a chaotic scramble that has no clear structure, and requires programmers to know and understand multiple different ways of expressing the same business concept.

Now that is truly increased risk.
1 comments
woooooo 1073 days ago
Long term vs short term. It's a bad idea to rush through refactors.
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cratermoon 1073 days ago
https://wiki.c2.com/?RefactorAsYouGo
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woooooo 1073 days ago
Not when you have an exec-inspired one liner patch that has to get rushed through at great impact to the business.

You can't just stack up a bunch of aphorisms and delegate your thought to them, some situations have context.

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cratermoon 1073 days ago
You said, "It's a bad idea to rush through refactors".

What constitutes "rushing through" a refactor, and what forces and context make it bad to do so? What can we do, if anything, to make it so that refactoring is as much a part of everyday development as the CI/CD process, and thus becomes just part of the work that's done, not something to be put off until the business decides there's nothing else with a higher priority?

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woooooo 1073 days ago
In the linked article, the situation was that they absolutely needed to change some hard-coded MONTHS value from 3 to 4 in order to keep the factory running.

That change should be shipped in isolation. With manual testing to cope for the lack of coverage, presumably. Refactoring doesn't have the same urgency as keeping the factory running, no matter how much we all believe in keeping the campground clean. It can wait until Monday in this particular case.

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cratermoon 1073 days ago
OK, but that's not the question I asked. What I want to know is how we can make refactoring as much a non-negotiable part of the process as code review, tests, CI/CD, or whatever you consider essential, non-skippable, even under a short timeframe?
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