The Boy Scout Principle

Last time we looked at refactoring. How real refactoring isn't re-writing big chunks of legacy code, it's cleaning as you go. Making sure the code you write now is clean. But what do you do about those big lumps of legacy? They weren't written with "clean" in mind, they were written with "hack it together to meet the date" in mind instead. It's messy and it's slowing you down. What do we do about it?

Well, we need to refactor it. But how, if we can't spend the whole sprint rewriting a big chunk of it? We need to stop thinking big - think small instead. Use the Boy Scout Principle - leave the camp ground cleaner than when you found it. When scouts leave a camp ground, they spend a few minutes cleaning up. Not just their rubbish but anything else they can find left by previous campers. And crucially, they don't try to clean up the whole forest, or even the whole camp-site - that would take weeks - they just clean up the area they were using.

Organisational ChangeDave Martin24 July 2018refactoring, efficiencyComment

Clean = Fast

Whenever I mention refactoring in an organisation, I usually get the same response - "Yes, we know it's important, but we don't have time. We need to move fast. We can't afford to go back and keep tweaking things, we have to keep moving forwards". On the surface that's a reasonable sounding argument. It doesn't matter whether your organisation is big or small, established or startup, the imperative is to move fast. Get things done. Those customers won't wait, you either give them what they want now or someone else will. In an environment like that, who has time for refactoring?

I'd like to challenge that thinking. Not the bit about having to move fast, that's a given these days. No, the bit I want to challenge is the bit about refactoring being incompatible with being fast. To me, refactoring is not an impediment to being fast, it's an enabler. I think the view that refactoring slows you down stems from a serious misinterpretation of what refactoring is.

Organisational ChangeDave Martin10 July 2018refactoring, efficiencyComment

Legacy is Anything Without Feedback

This post is the result of a conversation I had the other day, over a few after-work beers with Andrew Knevitt. He deserves a large part of the credit (and/or blame) for this for starting the ball rolling. Andrew was bemoaning the amount of legacy he had to deal with and I immediately started talking about code and automated testing. This wasn't what Andrew was referring to though. He was working mostly with business process and was referring to the problem of legacy business process. We all know the problems of legacy code - hard to maintain, fragile, lots of manual testing required. Legacy business processes have similar problems - clumsy, fragile, constantly out of date, lots of manual work required, and so on.

We both agreed that legacy process was a problem but neither of us could come up with a good explanation of what made a business process legacy. It's more than age - some old processes work really well but some brand new ones are out of date as soon as the ink is dry. So what makes a business process legacy? During the course of the discussion, I trotted out one of the more common definitions of legacy code - legacy code is any code written without automated tests. That was when the lightbulb went on for both of us. Legacy business process is any business process without a built-in feedback loop. But not just any feedback loop. A 2 yearly process review cycle isn't enough. It has to be fast feedback.