Refactoring at Scale

Chapter 8. Strategies for Execution

Opened in 1904, the New York City subway is among the world’s oldest and most-used public transit systems, serving just under six million riders on an average weekday. Those of us who are intimately familiar with the sprawling network have developed dozens of tiny optimizations that make riding the subway second nature. We listen for announcements to changes in service late at night on a Tuesday. We know the precise force and angle with which to scan our MetroCards through the turnstiles. For newcomers to the city, we can share some of these small but mighty tips to make their first few trips a bit less hectic.

Think of this chapter as like the friendly New Yorker giving you advice as you set out to navigate the city’s subway system. It contains a medley of tips for promoting smooth execution throughout a refactor. We’ll first touch on good team-building practices. There are a handful of ways we can go beyond establishing regular communication habits to keep our teammates productive and happy. Next, we’ll cover a few items you should be keeping track of during the refactor to make sure that you’re staying on course and know precisely what to attend to when you’ve reached the final stages of the refactor. Finally, we’ll discuss a few coding strategies to keep sturdy reins on the refactor as you’re implementing it.

Team Building

In Chapter 6, we examined a few reasons having a strong team is important within the context of large software projects, ...