Refactoring at Scale

Chapter 3. Measuring Our Starting State

Every spring, I take the time to clean out my closet and reevaluate all of the clothing I own. While some opt for a Marie Kondo–like approach to cleaning out their closets, seeing whether each item “sparks joy,” I take a more methodical one. Each year, when I kick off the process, I know that by the end, a number of items will be in the donate pile. What I don’t know is which pieces these will be, because it entirely depends on how all of my clothing works together in the first place.

Before I start packing some bags for Goodwill, I take a comprehensive look at the whole. I organize everything by clothing type: sweaters in one pile, dresses in another, and so on, accounting for the practicality of each item of clothing as I go. Which seasons is this dress good for? How comfortable is it? How often have I worn it in the past year? Next, I approximate how many outfits the item can be integrated with. It’s only once I have a strong sense of everything I own, and understand the role each item of clothing plays in my closet, that I can start to identify the clothing I can comfortably donate.

The same logic applies to large refactoring efforts; only once we have a solid characterization of the surface area we want to improve can we begin to identify the best way to improve it. Unfortunately, finding meaningful ways of measuring the pain points in our code today is much more difficult than categorizing items of clothing in our closets. This chapter ...