Code Refactoring - Reduces Costs and Increases Quality

An IT Software Development Executive walked into a well-run restaurant kitchen with a dozen chefs. This particular restaurant is famous for having a menu that is constantly changing and also takes custom requests from customers. Chefs are required to improvise.

He noticed an interesting thing the chefs were doing, while preparing the meals, they were constantly cleaning up to make sure their common work environment is clean and ready to take new orders that came in. They were doing it like it's a second nature.

In software development that clean up discipline is called "refactoring". Refactoring is not re-designing. It is not a separate project. It is not a task to be scheduled with a release.

Refactoring happens when developers are empowered to constantly make the code lean and fast every time they make a change. Allowing developers to make changes without proper analysis is a scary thought. This is where automated testing is critical. Automated testing reduces costs and the risk of breaking existing code.  

Cleaning up code or a kitchen or for that matter my kids' rooms, it means only one thing. Keeping items where they belong during and after a task. In software development this means making modifications where they should be made. However, when doing Agile development developers have to constantly figure out what the right place is. As more and more features are added every iteration, if changes are not in the right place, adding more features and keeping code organized becomes more expensive with every release.

For example, there is a Model/View/Controller paradigm which defines where different functions should be organized in code. Deciding what changes should be made where depends on various trade-offs. Tradeoffs made in the initial days of the project quickly become invalid in later stages of the product. Later trade-offs quickly become inconsistent with earlier tradeoffs making the code unclean very quickly.

When developers are not empowered to refactor, the cost of every enhancement goes up significantly, the risk of introducing bugs increases over time and as a corollary, with regular refactoring the product quality and speed of delivery will increase at a significantly lower cost per change.