Jazoon ‘09: Refactoring of Large Software Systems
Session title: Refactoring of Large Software Systems revised
Speakers: Sibylle Peter, Sven Ehrke – Canoo Engineering AG
First observation: This is a very well attended session, which reflects the fact that refactoring, whilst not the most glamorous of tasks, is obviously very important to a lot of developers.
The speakers describe the key lessons learned during a very challenging refactoring undertaking at a major bank. The project essentially involved trying to clean up software, the internal dependencies of which had gone out of control over time.
One of the key lessons learned: Keep it Simple, Stupid.
Options:
- Do a huge refactoring at some point once it has been recognised that costs per features have sky-rocketed. This is obviously not the recommended approach, but it is often the only option available.
- Do refactoring incrementally per release
- Do refactoring constantly
The costs of the project are pretty shocking: 6 persons for around a year. I could imagine this was a pretty sobering message for many members of the audience.
divman said,
July 11, 2009 @ 10:00 pm
How to estimate cost of such type of refactoring work if you only have very little knowledge about the system (lines of code, main services- billing, order processing, crm etc)