Another refactoring topic today: dealing with nulls. There are a bunch of techniques, but they amount to a) don’t, and b) do but only one time ever. The basic idea: a null always occurs in a particular context, and in that context, it has a meaning. When we pass it up or down our call-stack, […]
Dealing with Nulls Read More »
When I can’t test it where it is, I look to move it somewhere else, where I can test it. Today’s notion isn’t so much a single refactoring as it is a strategy that can be achieved in different ways (and different multiple steps). A modern and frequently occurring case: using a cool framework to
Refactoring Strategy: Move It Where You Can Test It Read More »
Another refactoring today: Use the observer pattern to invert an infelicitous dependency. In and of itself, this is a modest refactoring, but its smell often co-presents with others, and unraveling it all can be tricky. (Note: We aren’t remotely done talking about first and second-order refactorings, there are plenty more to go. But I’m not
Refactoring: Invert Dependency With Observer Read More »
Today, another small 2nd-order refactoring. I call it "wrap a Demeter". As with the others, this is a very modest step, but still quite useful in some situations. Demeter violations are places where a client accesses not just an upstream service, but that service’s upstream services, or even that service’s service’s upstream services. It’s a
Refactoring: Demeter-Wrapping Read More »
A key value for those who take up the change-harvesting approach: "keep it running". This is actually a direct result of human, local, oriented, taken, iterative, and argues against many finish-line efficiency approaches. Think of a change as a point A, with an arrow coming out of it and ending at a point B. At
Refactoring: Keep It Running Read More »
In our continuing conversation about refactoring, I want to go a little abstract today, and talk about chunking and naming. Naturally, a topic thisi important has already been addressed by a stupid joke in the movie Airplane!, so we’ll start there. A passenger is approached by a steward, asking if he might be able to
Chunking and Naming Read More »
Continuing on our conversation about large-scale transformations, I want to talk about change-harvesting’s “bias for action” and tell you a weird thing I did in kontentment the last couple of days. Change-harvesting takes the stance that our most reliable strategy for change is a highly iterative process of act-look-think, in roughly equal proportions, repeated in
Large-Scale Transformation and the Bias for Action Read More »
Large-Scale Refactorings — given the recent refactoring-related muses, a respondent asked me to talk about large or larger scale refactoring work. (I love it when people’s questions trigger my writing. Please do ask these things.) First things first, “large scale refactoring” is really a colloquial expression, a shorthand we sometimes use, but in my experience
Large-Scale Refactorings Read More »
Another small second-order refactoring for you today. I call it “narrow the question”. If you’re asking an object for data, ask for exactly what you want to know, instead of what you’d need to compute what you want to know. A very simple example: the PlayerView wants to disable/enable some of its controls when the
Second-Order Refactoring: Narrow The Question Read More »
As a hardcore user of TDD and refactoring, there are a number of what I think of as “second tier” refactorings that I use quite frequently. In one’s first intro to refactoring, one sees a lot of "rename", "re-order", "inline", and "extract". These are pretty potent tools, don’t get me wrong, but I think of
Second-Order Refactoring: Swap Supplier and Supply Read More »
