If you have a team of software engineers and want to move them to Mac, you will need to consider a number of things before you do so.
Here’s what’s new in our January 2023 Release Notes:
* Tables Columns Sorting Improved
* Reconcile Commits Count Between KPI Card and the Table
* Efficiency Tab Improvements and Efficiency KPI Cards Align
The official definition – Code Refactoring is the process of clarifying and simplifying the design of existing code, without changing its behavior.
It’s like housekeeping – to keep your home, office, store, warehouse… or software code clean and with everything in its proper place. Imagine being in a rush to make breakfast every morning, but never taking time to clean the dishes. At least three things eventually happen. You’ll run out of clean dishes, your kitchen will smell, and it’ll attract… BUGS!
Code refactoring is a lot about cleaning your code and keeping it clean. It doesn’t add anything to the code. As it doesn’t introduce new features, code refactoring is often set aside in favor of work on new features and releases with tight deadlines. As all code rots over time, it accumulates as technical debt making the work you have planned more difficult and take longer. This throws off your work estimates, increases costs, can cause deadlines to be missed, and reduces developer morale.
Developers spend more time reading code than writing it. Previously, we defined the fully-loaded cost of wasting one minute per day over a year at ~$300 per developer. That can add up fast when it comes to reading, understanding, and identifying what needs to be changed in code a different developer wrote.
If code is difficult to read (i.e. spaghetti code) it becomes harder to find typos, structural issues, bugs, dependencies, and repetitions. Refactoring to increase readability increases efficiency across all tasks.
Software engineering managers or project managers should make use of style guides and document their use for successive team members. This extends to establishing a coding standard and making sure it is reinforced during code reviews. Documenting any changes to either provide the means for all future team members to quickly achieve a common standard across all of the company’s software projects – past, present and future.
Whether it’s a web app, mobile app, or traditional software, end-users expect fast responses.
Code bloat slows software down. The slower software is, the less likely end-users will continue to use it if there are other options available. The overall impact for the software owner translates to fewer paying customers, placing poor software performance as on par with buggy software.
Bloat can be introduced in a variety of ways, by the programming language, compiler, or the programmer involved in producing the code. With Application Performance Management (APM) software, all manner of metrics can be tracked to identify slow components. Each bloated component can then be prioritized for refactoring according to impact.
Funny story – from 2004 at Al Taqaddim, Iraq. Way back then, Iraq was supposed to be a “No Fly Zone.” In reality, it was swarming with billions of flies. Using a fly swatter to kill one fly would immediately attract 2-3 more within five seconds. Why? Pheromones. You can file that under Useless Trivia.
But it applies in debugging when you kill one software bug only to introduce 2-3 more! Test-Driven Development prompts you to write tests before the functional code to verify that you kill the bug. If any tests fail, you know where to look.
It’s worth prioritizing repetitive code for refactoring when you find it as you can help reduce software bloat (performance) and reading time. You’ll likely nab a few bugs in the process, too. If all instances of repeated code aren’t fixed it can create bugs and cause confusion as to which instance is correct. Each element of the program should be unique to keep changes on it from impacting others.
Just as startups offering new ways of doing things emerge every year, many others go out of business or are acquired but discontinue service. Operating systems are regularly phased out, as shown in the table below. End-of-life software has its own dangers including security vulnerabilities, compliance issues (like GDPR), increased potential for software incompatibility and poor performance issues. Refactoring can help identify the affected code and components needing replaced.
While your project will take longer upfront, you reduce how much technical debt you’ll have later. Replacement options, operating systems, devices, and even third-party programs open up new functions that can be integrated into older software to keep it commercially competitive longer. You want to make sure all of the original code is working before introducing additional complexity with new functions.
As team members tend to rotate regularly, it’s worth pairing them up with another team member to refactor the code they worked on most – before they leave. That’s not always possible, but this is another reason for maintaining and enforcing a coding standard. They likely know certain portions of the code best, especially if they wrote it. So, it’ll be easier for them to refactor while their replacement observes and learns the ropes. It’s entirely possible they inherited the code in piss-poor shape and had insufficient time to routinely clean up the code. There are other stories that we don’t need to get into, suffice that knowledge silos do form and this is one way to hand them over.
The amount of time you can budget in for refactoring is never enough. To help you get the most out of the time you can find, take care to observe the following best practices for refactoring:
It’s nice to be able to quantify things. A million lines of code printed out comes to 18,000 pages, or 14x as long as Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” It’d take a developer 4 months to read it. Keep this in mind, briefly – as we’ll come back to it. In the interim, however, there are plenty of qualitative benefits to code refactoring:
Number of Operating Systems by Timeframe:
| Timeframe | iOS | Android | Windows |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2001-2010 | 2 iOS 1-2 | 2 Android 1-2 | 4 2000, XP, Vista, Win 7 |
| 2011-2015 | 7 iOS 3-9 | 4 Android 3-6 | 2 Win 8 & 10 |
| 2016-2020 | 5 iOS 10-14 | 5 Android 7-11 | NA |
If you have a team of software engineers and want to move them to Mac, you will need to consider a number of things before you do so.
Here’s what’s new in our January 2023 Release Notes:
* Tables Columns Sorting Improved
* Reconcile Commits Count Between KPI Card and the Table
* Efficiency Tab Improvements and Efficiency KPI Cards Align
Here’s what’s new in our December 2022 Release Notes:
* Developing Improvements for On-Prem Data Processing;
* Improving Jira Data Connection;
* Aligning Metrics throughout the Application.
