When Refactoring Goes Bad

http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2011/02/23/when-refactoring-goes-bad/

by danielmorrison • 15 years ago

8 5 15 years ago

stcredzero3• 15 years ago

Refactoring is one place where the notion of "iteration" and "fail fast" is tremendously beneficial.

When you get down a deep rabbit hole, you lose focus and passion. We had great things happening, but couldn’t show them to anyone since they weren’t done.

If you're going "down a deep rabbit hole" then you're doing it wrong. Refactor in small chunks. Be prepared to throw out a chunk. It's an experiment.

If your language doesn't support rapid refactoring -- this is something to think about.

danielmorrison• 15 years ago

I couldn't agree more, which is why I wrote the post ;)

Most of the time we do lots of rapid iterating (we're in Ruby and JS, mainly) and it goes great. That's why I thought it important to highlight when we do it wrong.

stcredzero3• 15 years ago

That's why I thought it important to highlight when we do it wrong.

I've also had the experience where I pulled out a lot of the refactoring tricks from Martin Fowler's book applied them, then looked at what I did and found it had made it worse! Instead of good code, I had an "anti-pattern" sometimes called "Macaroni." Things were done, like replace conditional with polymorphism, which one would expect to result in well factored code, but instead we just chopped up the code into little pieces that didn't make much sense and fatigued us when reading and debugging.

Refactorings are experiments. Some of them need to be thrown away.

When Refactoring Goes Bad

Related Stories