As new words and concepts diffuse in to wider use, their definitions become simpler or broaden to cover more scope.  Like the kid’s telephone game, each time the concept is passed to another developer, the information gets a little more muddled. In software development, declaration, macros, syntax and other programming constructs have to be exact or the compilers will fail.  Yet, when developers discuss concepts about programming, most of the time, that precision of language is lost.

The telephone game  seems to have happened to refactoring.  I subscribe to what would be consider the  ”classic” definition of  refactoring: the process of optimizing or extending a class  but leaving the existing exposed interface alone.  It seems that refactoring has been generalized from that definition into covering all activities related to touching old code.  Even worse, it has become an excuse to rework someone else’s code and then bitch about how bad it was.  Just look at the twitter stream for refactoring for a never-ending torrent of  abuse.

There is one simple way to tell if your efforts are truly a refactoring or not.  Did you break any of the unit tests?  If you did, then you are rewriting code instead of refactoring it and you had better update all the test cases while you’re at it.  Don’t get me wrong, there are times to rewrite software, but they are few and far between and, in my experience, it almost never pays off.

Refactoring isn’t just a nice philosophical idea; it supports one the most basic concepts in software development–backwards compatibility.  If you want to keep your customers and enjoy that paycheck, don’t break features or APIs in products without good reason or  get buy-in before release day.

To refactor the medical phrase “First, do no harm“, for developers it should be “First, break no test”.

Refactoring is a vital component for software developers, helping to prevent their projects from becoming unusable, and unmaintainable spaghetti code. Equally important to some developers, is the notion of refuctoring…check out this tongue in cheek look at Refactoring vs. Refuctoring. Be sure to check out the slide deck at the end.

Refuctoring describes the process of making your code unmaintainable by anybody but yourself.  I love some of the examples of Refuctoring such as “Pig Latin”, “Treasure Hunt” and my personal favorite “Stating the Bleeding Obvious”:

For example:

//initialize a to 1
int a=1;

Not that I’d ever do that (pause while I go clean up some code). Ahem, right anyways I thought I’d throw out some other refuctorings:

1.    “Catch me if you can” – Use so many goto statements that it will make anyone’s head spin.  Especially when you start adding backward goto’s.  Take a look at the CVS source code,  they have some nice (nasty) examples.

2.    “Giant tar pit of hell” – This is hard to blame one single developer as it really encompasses many developers getting together to create one big cohesive piece of crap.  You know you have a problem when you run out of printer toner trying to print these.

"Giant tar pit of hell"

3.    “WTF” – Using names that no one will know…ever.  If you create a bankaccount object, instead of calling it ‘x’, here’s a wild idea, why not call it ‘bankaccount’.  Let’s face it we are all guilty of this.

Now if you really want to be special (I don’t mean in a good way), try combining #1 and #3:

int afunction()
{

there:
   ...
   if(something)
   {
      goto here;
   }
   if(somethingelse)
   {
      goto there;
   }
here:
   ...
   if(somethingelseagain)
   {
   goto end;
   }
end:
...
return;
}

I have to admit, I’m not winning any awards either. It is certainly time to get on the refactoring bandwagon.

Good first day at ESC Boston2009. Gwyn and Alen presented a well attended talk on using source code analysis (SCA) to improve developer productivity. Key takeaways from the presentation:

• How SCA will impact your development velocity
• Quick history on SCA – talked about lint and the general evolution of the technology
• How the information generated by static code analysis can be used to solve a variety of development challenge
• Demo of where SCA fits from a code review, refactoring and bug detection standpoint

Interesting change from past presentations where most people now understand the basics of the technology… no need to spend too much time talking about its history and technology building blocks.

The presentation was recorded so we’ll load the video up at a later date for everyone’s viewing pleasure :)