On 02/05/18 12:22, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
Hi Hamish,
I think somebody said during that discussion that there wasn't time to
do it in industry, and that refactoring was mostly limited to open
source software projects.
Is that right, because I was pretty sure that refactoring was always
necessary to some degree, unless you were having to follow the
waterfall method? - nobody gets designs and implementations perfect
the first time, surely.
No, there's lots of designs that don't match the final requirements, and
implementation bugs in those designs. Re-work occurs to alter the
design and fix some of the bugs if they can't be ignored, e.g. customer
withholding payment. But that re-work doesn't have to be refactoring.
It can actually be the opposite, increasing the `technical debt' by
doing the minimum-cost work required to hopefully fix the problems, or
bury them long enough to achieve payment.
This can lead to a contorted design, e.g. the original OO class
hierarchy doesn't allow for the new requirement so something's cobbled
on the side as a get-around, or the logic in a function becomes more
complex in an attempt to fix a bug. At least it's then so complex that
it's not clear if any bugs remain. This is all typical in industry, and
free software. Lots of it is below average quality, by definition. And
the average isn't high. :-)
Cheers, Ralph.
Think RBS?
P.
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