Refactoring Should not Only be a Ticket

A while ago I tweeted

#Refactoring should never only be a dedicated task on your board. It should be an essential part of every other task you work on.

In this blog post I would like to elaborate a bit further on what I mean and why I think this is important.

When we do quality workshops and trainings on-site at our customers we see various approaches to refactoring which typically fail, for example:

1. A general ticket "Refactoring" is added to every sprint

2. Dedicated refactoring sprints are requested

The problem here is that refactoring is not seen as an essential part of the daily work, but instead as a dedicated task that requires additional time on top of daily work.

Compare your work as a programmer to the job of any type of craftsman: does that craftsman charge additional time for cleaning up the construction site? Of course not. Either you clean up your working place after finishing a task or you need to do it before starting the next. Both ways are possible, but just skipping to clean your workplace until you get dedicated time is not an option.

This is exactly the way how you should approach refactoring: When starting a new task you need to analyze the existing code anyway. If you stumble over some dirt, clean it up as you go. When you finished your task reflect what you just did. Maybe a method grew too large? Maybe you could avoid duplication? Maybe you chose a bad name? Fix it – now!

If your team accepts refactoring as an essential part of every work they perform, you will experience how fast your code base will improve at exactly the places you work on a lot.

Of course you will still discover bigger challenges while trying to clean up the construction site. There will be steps which turn out to be too large to be done on the go. These are exactly the parts which should be made dedicated tickets. But beware to just name a ticket "Refactoring". Be specific instead and explain exactly what needs to be achieved to put the team in a better position to clean up on the go.