Always leave the code better than you found it
letterstoanewdeveloper.com
letterstoanewdeveloper.com
The correct move is to wait until the org is so bogged down with tech debt that meaningful progress cannot be made, then switch companies/teams.
I have never worked with a PM who hasn't understood the concept of technical debt though. It sounds like a bad career move to work with such a person. Ignoring technical debt until development slows down to a crawl is a good idea? I don't buy it. My advice would be to either try to fix the issue (both the PM and the technical debt) immediately or find a new job.
So some developer is going to fix some code, and the code is ugly. So the developer fixes the bug and makes the code prettier and push it as a single commit. I am then left with figuring out which changes are related to the bug fix and what is related to the cleanup.
If I tell the developer to first fix the bug and then cleanup in a separate commit, it may be inefficient since the fix after cleanup may not be the same as fix before cleanup. It may also lead to the cleanup being skipped because his work is technically done after the fix.
If I tell him to cleanup first and fix later, it's also seem to lead to issues since the developer has typically already figured out how to fix it since he came into the code with the mindset of fixing the bug.
Of course I like the code being cleaned up, and I like the idea that you improve the code as you work with it. But I'm not sure what the best method is. Maybe the issue is with me, that I want the cleanup and fix in separate commits for easier reviewing.
Personally if I spot ugly code when fixing a bug I add unit tests, fix the bug and then add another ticket to improve the code. I then plan that code cleanup for this or the next sprint. But it feels tedious and is probably inefficient as well
Hmm. That has never been an issue for me in practice unless they go way too far with the refactoring. Usually it’s me who suggests cleanup for defensive coding reasons because the bug is often a coding issue.
Bigger refactorings and architectural changes usually require tracing the tendrils of an assumption out through the code. It’s not a matter of “can they figure it out,” it’s a matter of doing that in ten places and still somehow hold the other three bits of critical data in short term memory. If this path isn’t fruitful then there are five other theories to try so it’s not particularly amenable to writing it down. It’s flow state depth first search, and the crappy non-idiomatic code is ruining the flow.
People always try to deflect based on some intelligence argument. I’m not trying to understand your code, I’m trying to understand something you missed. This isn’t about intelligence, it’s about wisdom.
Make the change easy, then make the easy change. If they don’t they should expect comments. Code reviews are at least as much about setting standards and expectations as they are about catching new bugs.
The quick hacks are quick. That’s why they are so addicting. You have to look at the bigger picture. Is this the third time you’ve used the same quick fix? Then there’s a deeper problem. Does this problem keep happening in production? Then it’s better to take a breath, fix it correctly and once and for all, rather than to be randomly pre-empted by this issue for years to come. Those liabilities stack up, and eventually form clusters that make us look like we can’t do the job.
And last but not least, does this person really keep their promises to come back and fix things later, or is it just pretty words? If Cat Stevens were a coder, he’d write a song about all the someday lies developers tell themselves and each other. Father-son neglect dynamics have nothing on code rot.
I don't think you would find many people who would consider his actions a reasonable interpretation of it. I think this person would cause damage regardless of their motto or underlying intent.
Taking a leaf from the guidelines for person-to-person,discussion on this forum about arguing against the strongest version of your opponents argument: I think there is great value to lots of small improvements over a long period of time (no silver bullet etc). Certainly it should be tempered with the knowledge that the change is indeed an improvement. That can usually only be decided by the person who originally wrote it OR a consesus of the team involved.
I've worked on codebases where the whole team agrees a certain part of the codebase needs to be refactored, but we all also agree it is way too dangerous. Which is better? Working but hard to maintain spaghetti code, or clean, new, and broken code?
For your second point, I don't really see the applicability of this specific concept of the boy scout rule to the situation of "business critical code that is in such a bad state the whole team agrees it should be rewritten".
However, were I to try to apply the concept to your situation, the first question to ask is "why are people afraid to change the code?". There's usually 2 reasons for this. Firstly, the code and the problem are super complex and hard to understand, this just takes a lot of time, to develop the knowledge and intuition around the code. Secondly, the code lacks tests (unit / intergration / functional / manual spreadsheet of test cases) that assert the behaviour you expect. Therefore my (unasked for and probably already known to you) suggestions for "leaving it cleaner than you found it" would be to make a start on understanding the code better through a series of very very very small refactorings. Pick one tiny function that is a mess and clean it up. At the same time, ensure your changes are correct by asserting all expected behaviour of that function.
If you are now saying "duh of course" well thats the point. I do not think a single reasonable person would suggest that a full rewrite of a complex business critical system that is either poorly understood, poorly tested or both is a charitable interpretation of what the article is talking about.
At the end of the day it is super easy to shoot down any idea or concept in programming, because we have so much power to abuse and ruin anything day to day if we're not careful. It's the easiest thing in the world to take a machete to a codebase without thought. But the problem there is the person holding the machete, they can't be trusted with it. I cannot think of a single thing that wouldn't be misinterpreted or done badly by some of the terrible coders I've met during my career.
I sweeten the pot with management by pointing out that if you do this, it’s easier to ramp up new people. If you can ramp up new people, you can absorb new customers without making a fool of yourself in the process. We should want to be able to take on big new customers, right?
(See also the discussion when I posted this on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198597 ).
That's not what I intended, which is why I have this in there:
> Often you’ll jump into code to fix a bug, investigate an issue or answer a question.
> When you do so, improve it. This doesn’t mean you rewrite it, or upgrade all the libraries it depends on, or rename all the variables.
> You don’t need to transform it.
> But you should make it better. Just clean it up a bit. Doing so makes everyone’s lives just a bit better, helps the codebase in a sustainable way, and assists the business by making its supporting infrastructure more flexible.
Perhaps I need to make it super explicit that you should understand whatever changes you are making, discuss them with team members, have them code reviewed, and start with small steps (like documentation). I thought that was implied with the above, but maybe I wasn't clear enough.
> we were left with his crappy code
Seems like a horrible situation. I have so many questions!
If it was a true refactor (and not new functionality) why did you have to use the crappy code? Or did he do a rewrite in the process of adding new functionality? Who was reviewing the code? How did it get merged to the mainline?
It is a common refrain against simple mottos or ideologies in programming for people to pick the worst memory they have of a coder or experience as an example of why it cannot work.
As if the problem with a bad team member is that they heard the wrong motto, if only they hadn't started incorrectly following the boy scout rule their contributions would be exemplary.
> You don’t need to transform it. But you should make it better. Just clean it up a bit.
> A warning about refactoring. Don’t refactor what you don’t understand. Don’t drive by refactor. Discuss your plan with someone more familiar with the code.
if your organization has lost its grip on the code base, no one understands it, and every time you try to touch it something odd breaks and you have to spend days tracking it down - you have a problem.
if you can talk to someone about what the code does, and there is sufficient testing in place so make it safe to change - you don't have a problem.
refactoring is the process of (re)taking ownership of the codebase. the result is in your head. you don't even need to get the result committed for it to have been useful.
It's probably that way for a reason.
Every time I tried to clean up code, I ran into the following:
Some arcane bug was exposed
The previous developers couldn't understand it
Something else broke
I find this assumption to be harmful. There’s really no probably about it; it’s just the way it is, might have been intentional, might have been completely unwitting. The solution should be to refactor if you have to but in a way that doesn’t change the underlying functionality.
If you think about it, there is an extreme case as a contractor where the code you need to change is so convoluted and impossible to understand (imagine a neural net without the training set) that you just can’t change it without refactoring. So I would argue refactoring is necessary sometimes.
Why were they using a quantity field for more than just numbers? Why was it only being used in some corner of the code in a totally different module?
Most of the production code I've touched I would never dare to do something like this until I had a very good understanding of the codebase as a whole.
Obviously any but the most trivial refactor requires some care. Is it worth it, when (in the context of OP) you're in there to do something else? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. One rule of thumb is whether you're just rearranging code or changing the fundamental way that it works. Refactors of the first type can generally be kept low-risk and are probably worthwhile. Rewrites of the second type involve more risk and are probably better left to be projects unto themselves.
I’ve resigned myself to the idea that there’s two diametrically opposed way to run a software project.
One is by rote memorization. The people on the team have been there a long time. Seniority is hard to achieve because everyone makes dumb mistakes for a few years, instead of six months, due to the code being rife with tribal knowledge. This group gets very, very cranky when you refactor, because you are moving things out of place. Things they spend a great deal of effort memorizing. You’re threatening their seniority, their job security, and their control.
Another way is to design for people getting in and out quickly. The knowledge is curated, the code tells a story you can follow. Important assumptions are encoded plainly, perhaps documented there or in a wiki. This team can size up or down more quickly without bloodshed. Which is great if there are other projects that need attention, not so good if the company is a one trick pony with money flow problems. Counterintuitively, your best people may choose to stay a little longer here because they don’t feel trapped.
Early in my career I had a lot of luck changing engineering culture for the better, and I mistakenly assumed these techniques would work anywhere. They work lots of places, but they don’t work on a team that is collectively smarter than you are. Like doctors, clever but misguided developers can make the worst patients. There was one team in particular in a vertical I really wanted to be in, where I should have quit four months in, when it was obvious we would never see eye to eye. How can you hate your own code but refuse to change how you write it? Sometimes the smartest developers are the dumbest people.
Good severance package when the layoffs happened, but I suspect to this day the manager thinks I was part of their decline, rather than the harbinger.
In a way we are both right. My energies would have been better spent elsewhere. I’ve thought a lot about how to detect this sort of dynamic at new prospects but the best I’ve come up with is maybe don’t take a job where you’re the first new hire in n years and everyone else has been there forever. It might be okay, but it might be hell on wheels.
For example, one time I went through a comment-less source file full of mathematical formulas and replaced magic numbers with meaningful constants and documented which RF chipset datasheet each formula/constant was coming from (including page number). Other developers thanked me later when they were looking for the same thing.
I think it's a good philosophy, whether it's about code or trash. It makes everyone's life better overall.
When I was in scouts, our scout leader was adamant that we should leave the place "The way it would have been if left alone" and not try to push our own ideas of "better" on things. Which I think is a much better line of thinking, even if still flawed.
One of the examples in the article is upgrading a dependency. This could easily fall into the category you mention if the upgrade itself is not properly tested. A considered approach would be:
"I want to make a small improvement, oh I see this dependency is out of date and has some minor vulnerabilities or perf issues, or is missing a feature that could come in handy for XYZ. Hmm, there are no tests confirming our assumptions about the current library version, nor are then any tests are our code / systems that use it. I guess my improvement should be to add those tests, then next time someone has the same idea it'll be an easier upgrade"
I am unsure but I also interpret from your first sentence that you may have seen people use this rule as a defence for gold plating (the opposite of KISS or YAGNI). Similarly this should fall under the heading of changes made without proper discussion, thought or consideration.
Otherwise I think we're really stuck, if team members cannot be trusted to properly interpret the boy scout rule without messing up a codebase then how on earth can they be trusted to build the foundation of their company / team / system?
The big fights come in (as seen in comments in this post already) when there was no original design, and it's mess vs possibly dubious attempts to clean up the mess.
However this is all becoming a wide ranging statement about the entire job of a dev team. So far removed from the extremely innocuous advice of the article around "make small improvements regularly". Whilst you can apply caveats to that around "test your improvements", "check your improvement with others more familiar with that code" etc etc, these are all things that should be expected of a professional. At the risk of talking about no-true-scotsman.
If someone cannot be trusted with the advice "make small improvements regularly" then what the f* can they be trusted with?
In New Zealand, there are many invasive species of animals and trees. Should they interfere and try to remove the invasive species? Or you should they "leave it alone" and let the pine trees take over all native plant species? (the same is happening in the french Alpes where pine trees are invading a lot of land).
Eg in a PR description "I also boyscouted the entire login service a bit while I was in there".
I’d say pretty much no one agrees on what “better” looks like. Better to someone often means applying a pattern that they just discovered in a blog post that week. Software design is still entirely subjective.
For example, “better” once meant refactoring to be more object-oriented. That’s backfired a bit recently, so now “better” might mean having a more functional design. There’s no evidence that either of these actually have any impact on the end result of quality as perceived by users.
Anyway, it’s good to be positive. There’s probably subconscious good that comes from that.
Just to give you an example (which I ran across last week), if you have some code handling a cart in an e-commerce site and you need to keep track of the number of items in this cart would you prefer the variable name "totalAmount" or "quantity". There's also a variable named "totalAmountIncludingTax" which holds the monetary amount to pay for the items in the cart.
So, again, your absurd scenario proves to be quite a weak argument when you consider the scope of the whole problem.
I don't see people renaming from say numberOfItems to noOfItems or similar, if that's the type of renames you're referring to. Can you give an example of a rename you are seeing?
No. There are plenty of not-purely-subjective criteria to justify refactors:
* the refactor improves abstraction quality
* design improvements that result in edge cases being obviated
* coupling is diminished/cohesion is improved
The relativistic "there is no perfect software design" view is good inasmuch that you don't make idols out of any particular design approach. It is bad when it becomes a fatalistic, thought-terminating meme used to justify one's own inaction. Software design is difficult work. That doesn't mean it isn't possible because the Internet hasn't figured out an exact recipe for creating it. :)
The quality of abstractions is entirely subjective.
> coupling is diminished / cohesion is improved
This is also entirely subjective. The idea that eliminating coupling is inherently good is an unsound premise. There’s no proof that coupling is bad, and even if there were, there’s also the conversation to be had about which things should be coupled, which is surely a subjective conversation.
> design improvements resulting in edge cases being obviated
I guess this one is slightly closer to being an objective good. Though even still, I think this is linear thinking at its finest. You may be getting rid of some edge cases but introducing others. Every design is a trade off, and evaluating tradeoffs is a subjective act.
Generally in this scenario your job is to make a change that fulfils the requirements, verify that it works and test it manually, pass it onto QA and move on. Businesses often don't care your improvements unless it is a new feature and it will make you look bad because it will take you longer to complete a task than they deem necessary.
As for refactoring in this situation. Don't. Even making seemly simple changes can it makes it difficult for others to code review it, or could incur breakage (yes there are some systems that are this fragile).
I think one of the most useful parts of this list of suggestions is to write or improve tests. You did allude to this, but I think it’s the most useful part (if test coverage starts out poor) because by doing so, especially before doing any other changes, you’re making it easier to do some of the other suggestions with confidence.
Good read!
Or do you mean that small incremental improvements shouldn't be attempted because a proper review of whether they are worth it or not will be "wasted effort" if its decided they are not worth it?
Or something else? Not being sassy, genuinely unsure.
As for me personally, I would never hire an outside consultant to improve a codebase. The incentives are all wrong (long term maintenance to be done after they leave) and it's unlikely they'll be working on it for long enough to properly understand either the codebase or the domain.
In general, I highly doubt anyone would hire a consultant just to "rewrite code". Rewriting code is not a business objective. Improving application performance is, delivering features more efficiently and reliably is. These are some examples of objectives that might involve rewriting code (or not, not every codebase is a swamp in need of draining).
In the context of this article though, the code to be "improved" should be anything you touch. Did you use a function in building some new widget and you noticed it had no tests and no docs so it took you ages to integrate? Then add a test and the minimal doc string.
In terms of who is watching the consultant, I'm unclear why you're asking me, a person who has just said they would never hire a consultant to do anything with code. But if I had to, I would get someone of at least equivalent technical knowledge. However I'm pretty sure thats not how it usually works, which is probably why inept consulting companies rinse big companies for so much money for such lacklustre results.
But overall I really have no idea what you're talking about with regard to consultants and rewriting code. None of which seems to have much relevance to this article about making tiny improvements regularly. Unless your comment was in the wrong thread?