Session title: Refactoring of Large Software Systems revised
Speakers: Sibylle Peter, Sven Ehrke – Canoo Engineering AG

First observation: This is a very well attended session, which reflects the fact that refactoring, whilst not the most glamorous of tasks, is obviously very important to a lot of developers.

The speakers describe the key lessons learned during a very challenging refactoring undertaking at a major bank. The project essentially involved trying to clean up software, the internal dependencies of which had gone out of control over time.

One of the key lessons learned: Keep it Simple, Stupid.

Options:

• Do a huge refactoring at some point once it has been recognised that costs per features have sky-rocketed. This is obviously not the recommended approach, but it is often the only option available.
• Do refactoring incrementally per release
• Do refactoring constantly

The costs of the project are pretty shocking: 6 persons for around a year. I could imagine this was a pretty sobering message for many members of the audience.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 10:36 am by Mike and is filed under General, Jazoon, Refactoring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.