What's your unit of measure?

What's your unit of measure? 85

Posted by Brett Schuchert Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:27:00 GMT

A few weeks back while teaching a class a student asked about refactoring. He we skeptical of the whole idea. “We don’t have time to write new functionality let alone fix code that ‘isn’t broken’.”

After some back-and-forth I asked him this question: What’s your unit of measure for estimating how long a refactoring is going to take?

In retrospect, this is nearly a nonsensical question.

He hemmed and hawed explaining why he could not refactor, why the code was the way it was, etc. After listening to this I then asked the question again: What’s your unit of measure? Is it Weeks, Days, Hours, Minutes?

It took several more rounds of this but I finally got an answer. He said “Days.”

I said something like “Ah-ha! That’s why you cannot refactor, you’re trying to do way too much.”

There are refactorings, and then there are Refactorings (notice the capital R for emphasis). As a matter of course, if I notice:

something that’s poorly named
a method that’s too long
obviously repeated code
etc.

I’ll fix it. The work takes a few seconds to minutes and then I’m off. Notice that the unit of measure for estimating isn’t relevant since it takes nearly no time.

Think of it this way. You’re on your way to the kitchen. You haven’t thoroughly cleaned your living room and there’s clutter on the coffee table. On your way to the kitchen, you pick up a few empty glasses and put them in the sink. You’ve just refactored your living room. If you do this every time you move, over time you’ll notice that your living room looks a whole lot better.

If you do this as a habit, your living room will stay cleaner longer – or get dirty slower.

On the other hand, there are those “big refactorings” that get placed on the back burner (backlog) and do not get done until it is impossible to move forward. That’s a whole other level of refactoring and maybe there should be another term for that kind of activity.

This is akin to dusting, vacuuming, mopping, the stuff some people only do when people are coming over. If you do the small stuff out of habit, you’ll be in a better place to do the big stuff when your parents call and say they’re coming over.

Refactoring, cleaning up as you go, is something that should not seem like a lot of work. It should be something to do out of habit. It’s not a separate activity from coding, it is coding – restructuring without changing functionality – organizing.

Think about it. As programmers, all we really do is organize stuff. We write code that stores information, processes it, allows users to type in stuff and get something done but ultimately we organize stuff.

So the next time you notice a badly-named method and you have the refactoring tools to support you, try a 30-second refactor. It will not seem like much but if you do it a few times every day and then you can get your team to start doing it, over time you’ll notice big improvements.

Just remember this:

Nothing + Nothing + Nothing eventually equals something…

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http://goldentoolbox.blogspot.com/ about 3 hours later:

I find the time calculations made for the bigger refactorings are mostly flawed. To get a fair estimate you will have to take the time the actual refactoring takes and subtract the time it will save …

I also often been given the argument that the code will need to be regression tested afterwards. This mostly however ignores the fact that the code will need to be regression tested before the next release anyway.

The art is to make the right business case and present and argue it up the management structure.
Jason 2 days later:

The emphasis should definitely be on doing these daily as soon as they are discovered (or within a day). If you let a large mound of code build around something that is poorly named for example, it becomes closer to a Refactoring than a refactoring.
Ansgar 3 days later:

Brilliant!

If you do this as a habit, your living room will stay cleaner longer â€“ or get dirty slower.

I think that by reversing the metaphor I’ve gained more profound insight on housekeeping than on programming. Now I can also view cleaning up the house as refactoring :-)
Brett Schuchert 3 days later:

It’s all the same, isn’t it?-)

Depending on the environment and language, I might prefer housework to coding – though that’s a rare situation.
TorbjÃ¶rn Kalin 4 days later:

If you have the right tool for the job, say a pair of jeans with a built-in vacuum cleaner, it is of course much easier to do the small clean-ups.
Matt Cox 4 days later:

Nice and solid advice.
Kit 4 days later:

One issue here is interrupting one’s train of thought. I would suggest if you see a need to refactor and you are in the middle of doing something else, stopping to refactor would probably make you less productive overall, than just leaving it and coming back to it when you are mentally free.
Tim 4 days later:

I am not sure. I have trouble maintaining my train of thought sometimes, too. What I find is that if I write something down I don’t have to remember it.

I like to keep a list (usually on back of a 3×5 card or in a notebook) of the tests I want to write. This is a fairly common practice. When you think of a test you should write, you put it on the list, and when you write it or obviate it you scratch it off. I think this was a Beck practice, though I don’t recall where I heard it first.

This way, I can maintain a state of productive work with refactoring and even across breaks. I always know where I am if I let the tests and the list keep me in line. I can go home and come back tomorrow.

I think it is worth the time to develop your habits so that a refactoring (small r) is not worth skipping.
serverdude 4 days later:

I’m not sure, I like the allegory – even though it’s sound advice to keep your code (,office space, and living quarters) clean.

In my mind the reverse of cleaning up would also be refactoring, that is – moving stuff onto the coffee table. There are no test, that when moving/removing entities from the system, i.e. cleaning up, the system is still working. E.g. if you put the remote control in the dish washer, the next person wanting to watch TV will find your refactoring actually broke the system.

How does dust accumulate? Would that be code-rot? But code does not get worse over time of unmodified!

In my mind refactoring has something to do with keeping functionality but changing the implementation or the interface. Sticking to the domestic vocabulary – you should be knocking down walls and building new ones while checking that the structure is still sound, and all the uses of all the affected rooms are still the same if not better. This would – at least to me – seem like a refactoring, while the Refactoring would be to demolish the entire house and build another.
raveman 4 days later:

i think people forget that not everybody is using TDD and sometime everybody makes small mistake, like write == instead of != and when you do not IDE refactoring you can introduce some bugs.
Tim 4 days later:

Serverdude,

I’ve never had my dishes dirty themselves and migrate into the living room of their own accord. Mine are generally carried in by one of two boys living in my house, or less often by one or more of their parents. That’s not code rot, that mess accretion. Mess piles up because people pile up the mess in the course of doing other things, and don’t clean it up.

Carrying the cups from the coffee table (and game console area) over to the kitchen is refactoring—paying off the “dish migration debt” that someone has accrued.

I think that makes it a pretty good analogy. As analogies go.
MÃ¡rio Marinato 4 days later:

Great text man. Could I translate it and post it on my blog?

Brazilian greetings.
serverdude 5 days later:

Tim

As I see the combat of left behind dirty dishes: You keep cleaning up the living room – well moving the obtrusive things to some other place – and the boys keeps on messing.

That analogy would – to me – seem like developers battling in the version control system of where to put a resource and possibly a battle of you always cleaning others crud, which is certainly not what I’d recommend.

Your dishes may not have dirtied themselves, but dust certainly accumulates without me having to do anything ;)

Anyway .. I just don’t think that removing obsolete or unused resources and removing trailing whitespace really fits the term refactoring. And that’s the way I read your entry.

It’s still a vital part of being a programmer though :)
Nino 15 days later:

Nice and cool
Brett Schuchert about 1 month later:

Mario,

I though I responded in the affirmative about translating the text. Please feel free to do so.

Where in Brazil? I’ve been to Brazil once for a 9-day vacation. Simply a breathtaking country.

Brett
MÃ¡rio Marinato 2 months later:

Hello, Brett

I’m glad you agree to have the text translated into Portuguese. I’ll work on that today and inform you when I publish it.

I live in the state of Rio de Janeiro, but not on the city of Rio de Janeiro. I live in a city that’s two hours away from Rio de Janeiro city. You can see some photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/osarcofago/

Do you have an email for direct contact? Mine is mariomarinato [at] gmail [dot] com
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