You’re right – “the conditionals are getting pushed up to the top of the chain” – but there’s no “just” about it. It’s very powerful. As @thkala says, you just make the choice once; from there on out, the object knows how to go about its business. The approach you describe – BaseAction, ViewAction, and … Read more
Final effect is the same – entry which was Removed or Excluded won’t be refactored, the difference is in presentation. After selecting Exclude you keep entry in the Refactoring Preview, but Remove deletes it from that window. I think that Remove could be useful when you deal with quite large refactoring and marking everything as … Read more
Ask him what will he do when he finds a bug in his code. How many places will he now need to fix it in? You can also show him the answers to this question (Why is “copy and paste” of code dangerous?).
Legacy code is a big issue, and I’m sure people will not agree! I would say that starting a big re-factor could be a mistake. A big re-factor means doing a lot of work to make it function exactly the way that it does now. If you choose to take this on on your own, … Read more
Read Michael Feather’s book “Working effectively with Legacy Code” This is a GREAT book. If you don’t like that answer, then the best advice I can give would be: First, stop making new legacy code[1] [1]: Legacy code = code without unit tests and therefore an unknown Changing legacy code without an automated test suite … Read more
It’s a perfect example for YAGNI: it is more work it inflates your project it may complicate your design it has no immediate benefit the scenarion you write it for may never manifest when it does, your wrapper most likely needs to be re-written completely because it is tied too closely to the concrete library … Read more
General tip: if (it is working) Do (not touch it); else { Make (as few modifications as possible) Or (it will stop working at all); } This is experience of generations.
Without any offense intended, the decision to rewrite a codebase from scratch is a common, and serious management mistake newbie software developers make. There are many disadvantages to be wary of. Rewrites stop new features from being developed cold for months/years. Few, if any companies can afford to stand-still for this long. Most development schedules … Read more
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code The Rule of Three The first time you do something, you just do it. The second time you do something similar, you wince at the duplication, but you do the duplicate thing anyway. The third time you do something similar, you refactor. Three strikes and you refactor. Coders … Read more
We refactor mercilessly, and use Cyclomatic complexity as one of the metrics that gets code on our ‘hit list’. 1-6 we don’t flag for complexity (although it could get questioned for other reasons), 7-9 is questionable, and any method over 10 is assumed to be bad unless proven otherwise. The worst we’ve seen was 87 … Read more