Friday 7 December 2018

You need Refactoring to stay Agile and competitive

Do you want to release software to production often and fast, continuously? Do you want to release high-quality software? In other words, do you want to deliver value to your customers before your competitors do it for you?

One of the building blocks for high-quality software is the practice of refactoring. If you cannot refactor but continue to add new features, your software quality will most likely degrade over time, and you will accumulate high levels of technical debt.

I have seen that recently at a project for a client where we had a bunch of good developers, but the fact that they did not refactor the code on a regular basis and continued to introduce new features meant the project came to a point where there were significant issues with every release. Pretty much most of the recent releases would not go to production on time, and if they did, there were major bugs discovered by customers.

The three main contributors to lack of refactoring, in this case, were (surprise!?) 


  1. Not enough interest from the business in investing in technical excellence ("Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility") 
  2. Lack of sufficient levels of acceptance/functional UI and API testing. No confidence in the tests meant developers were afraid to change production code in case they break existing features. 
  3. Root cause analysis of issues leads to developers having to explain themselves, which teaches developers to stay under the radar and not change anything that is not necessary. 

How can we resolve these issues? 


  1. Educate the business on the consequences and trade-offs they are making when they are not investing in technical excellence, especially refactoring in this case. For example, lack of refactoring together with continually adding new features is likely to result in lower quality software (resulting in more likely customer facing issues business have to report to FCA) and less predictable and less frequent releases (resulting in less value delivered to the customers and allowing competitors deliver that value instead). 
  2. Build up a robust suite of tests that the developers trust — for example, a testing pyramid that would include unit tests, integration tests, BDD API acceptance tests, BDD UI acceptance tests and contract tests. 
  3. Create a culture of "The process is to blame, not individuals". Whenever something terrible happens, figure out how to change the development process rather than point at individuals. For example, instead of blaming a developer for introducing a bug, figure out what types of tests should we start writing to avoid these types of bugs leaking to production in the future. 
Transformations like these are a process of continuous improvement. Fortunately, this particular client, every time we explained the consequences of the actions they take, they would listen carefully, engage in a dialogue, help us understand their environment better and help us help them change where necessary. The end goal for everybody was always to deliver more value to customers faster.

What is your experience with lack of refactoring?

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