Prequel to Dealing with Design Debt
Two of my recent posts described how we are currently paying down our design debt in a big chunk. As I eluded to in those posts, this sort of balloon payment is atypical, and has lead us to deviate from our normal development practices. So what are our typical development practices as they regard technical debt and scar tissue? Shock the world I don’t mean to blow your mind, but we refactor as we go, leaving the park a little cleaner than we found it. In its simplest form, that means for every bug, feature or enhancement worked on we strive for refactoring equivalency. In other words, we aim to refactor code proportional to the amount of change necessitated by the bug fix or to meet the feature or enhancement requirements. If we have to add 10 new lines of code for a new feature, then we also need to find 10 lines of code worth of refactoring to do (generally in that same area of the code). Beyond that simple precept are some practical considerations; we have to have some g