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When Refactoring Goes Bad

8 points| danielmorrison | 15 years ago |collectiveidea.com | reply

5 comments

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[+] stcredzero|15 years ago|reply
Refactoring is one place where the notion of "iteration" and "fail fast" is tremendously beneficial.

When you get down a deep rabbit hole, you lose focus and passion. We had great things happening, but couldn’t show them to anyone since they weren’t done.

If you're going "down a deep rabbit hole" then you're doing it wrong. Refactor in small chunks. Be prepared to throw out a chunk. It's an experiment.

If your language doesn't support rapid refactoring -- this is something to think about.

[+] danielmorrison|15 years ago|reply
I couldn't agree more, which is why I wrote the post ;)

Most of the time we do lots of rapid iterating (we're in Ruby and JS, mainly) and it goes great. That's why I thought it important to highlight when we do it wrong.