Refactoring – Not on the backlog (2014)

Summary

There has recently been a lot of noise on the lists, and questions at conferences, about putting refactoring "stories" on the backlog. Even if "technical debt" has grown up, this is invariably an inferior idea. Here's why: When our project begins, the code is clean. The field is well-mowed, life is good, the world's our oyster. Everything is going to be just fine. We can build features smoothly and easily, though we always seem to take a few little twists and turns. Things look pretty clean, and besides, we're in a hurry. We don't notice anything going wrong and we press on rapidly. However, we're letting some brush build up in our nearly perfect field of code. Sometimes people call this "technical debt". It really isn't: it's really just not very good code. But it doesn't look too bad -- yet. As we build, however, we do have to detour around the thickets, or push through them. Generally we detour around. Inevitably, this slows us down a bit. In order to keep going rapidly, we are even less careful than before, and soon more weedy thickets have grown up. These new thickets, on top of the old ones, slow us down even more. We realize there's a problem but we're in too much of a hurry to do anything about it. We press harder to maintain our early velocity. Soon, it seems like half the code we have to work with is burdened with weeds, brush, undergrowth, obstacles of every kind. There might even be some old cans and dirty clothes in there somewhere. Maybe even some pits. Every trip through this messed-up field of code becomes a long trek of dodging through the brush, trying to avoid the pits that have been left behind. Inevitably, we fall into some of these and have to dig our way back out. We're going slower than ever before. Something has to give! The density of problems is very visible to us now, and we see that we can't just take a quick wipe at the field and do ourselves any good. We have a lot of refactoring to do to get back to a clean field. We are tempted to as...