Techniques and Good Practices: Refactoring
Explore techniques to maintain clean and manageable code in large Agile projects through continuous refactoring. Learn the reasons why refactoring is often neglected, best practices to make it a habit, coordination strategies for global refactorings, and the importance of tooling and version control to support these efforts. Understand how refactoring serves as a learning opportunity to improve software design and team collaboration.
Refactoring
Typically, if a system grows over time, its design tends to get messier and messier at the same time. This can be worse on a large team because the more people that are involved with building a system, the harder it is to keep it clean. However, if everybody on the team refactors continuously, there is a chance that the design will stay clean and easy to understand.
Why isn’t refactoring common?
Refactoring does not seem to be a common habit in (large) teams because:
- A lot of people still believe it will slow them down.
- Sometimes there is no refactoring tool support for the particular project available, which makes it much more difficult than it should be.
- The developers often fear being