In our practice, there have been a lot of cases where clients tend to ignore the importance of refactoring. The fact is, code refactoring benefits your business under a long-term, rather than short-term, perspective. The question is whether to refactor or not to refactor. Is it really worth investing resources while under development?

What Is Code Refactoring?

Refactoring is an important technique that’s extensively used in software development. It is a practice of improving or restructuring code without changing its external functional behavior. The benefits of code refactoring include code readability, reduced complexity, and easier maintainability. The idea is to transform inefficient and hard-to-read code into optimal and simplified code. The result of refactoring is clean and simple code design, which enhances software development and increases the quality of the end product.

There is a known risk associated with refactoring. However, refactoring should be done systematically to make software or applications more manageable. When managers and customers hear discussions about the quality of code, they conclude that adding features during a software build will cost more time and money.

Refactoring is valuable because it enables you to maintain the product in a healthy state, adding new features at a lower cost, and more significantly, adding new features at a faster rate.

Why Code Refactoring Is Important?

Code refactoring is often considered an investment, but what’s important is that it leads to long-lasting results.

The practice is beneficial because:

• Refactoring betters the design and structure of a software product;
• Decent code refactoring helps to build a product on a clean base;
• It makes work easier for all developers, new or old;
• It also makes a software product ready for future updates.

When Do You Need Refactoring?

Technically, refactoring should be part of an ongoing quality improvement process. Code refactoring should be interrelated with the daily performance of every software developer.

In a nutshell, code should be refactored when adding a new feature or functionality, fixing a bug, or during a code review. It should also be refactored when code smells are detected.

The following are indicators of when it’s time to refactor:

• Increased time to add new features (as compared to similar features in the past), and as a result, lower development velocity;
• Frequent and long cycles to fix bugs (one fix leads to new bugs);
• Inaccurate estimates, both over- and underestimate. It becomes hard to estimate changes on complicated code..

Authors of “Leading Lean Software Development,” Mary and Tom Poppendieck, pinpoint the need to refactor on a permanent basis, rather than simply the need to refactor.

“Code must be continuously refactored to deal with any duplications or ambiguities that are discovered through a deeper understanding, or introduced by the latest change. An increasing number of tools are available to assist with refactoring, but tools are not usually the issue here. Like continuous testing, continuous refactoring is not optional.”

To Sum Up

After performing refactoring sessions for the projects we were working on, our clients realized that refactored code helped them to improve their software product’s scalability, or simply get from MVP, to adding new features faster and more efficiently.

Do you still think refactoring is non-mandatory?