Fear of Refactoring?
I have noticed that lately this blog hadn’t covered one of the issues this blog was born for: Analysis, Design and Development. This is what I do every day!
In the latest weeks I have been working hard on a project that was underrate to support all the stuff I needed, so two words come into my mind: Redesign and Refactoring. Scary?
Not at all!
If redesigning is a word that speaks for itself, Refactoring isn’t, is it? Refactoring is one of the words that scares a lot of Developers (or worst… Coders) and it is easily explained:
Refactoring is the process of rewriting a computer program or other material to improve its structure or readability, while explicitly preserving its meaning or behavior.
Well, try to immagine a house, where you are the builder. Immagine that this house is quite good, but that one day you see that the walls are faulty, or simply they are not what you really need. What can you do? Nothing. In programming this is not true, because you can restructure all the code in order to obtain what you want (or what you really need). The main issue does not change, wouldn’t you be scared?
The answer is: Yes, someone can be scared about it. Putting your hand in a “working code” with the risk of messing everything up is scary, but small people doesn’t see other than small things!
Obviously you cannot tear down the walls of your house, this is why development is very flexible! A good Refactoring refreshes the code, speed up the processes, clean up bugs and allow your application to be expandable!
“Refactoring fear you should not!” Master Yoda would have said “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
Refactoring means learning every day, applying new practices to old ideas.
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