Wild Idea

What happens when right in the middle of things, what seems like a much better idea appears? Includes: musing on the balance between code quality and shipping. Ward Cunningham’s original definition of Technical Debt describes the situation where the code we have does not fully reflect the understanding we now have about the problem and solution. We’ve done the best we knewL it’s just that now we know more, and that knowledge is not reflected in the code. Similarly, Kent Beck’s rules of simple design prescribe code that runs all our tests, expresses all our design ideas, contains no duplication, and minimizes the number of programming entities. Both of these notions ask us to have all our design knowledge reflected in the code, and, it should go without saying, we want that knowledge to be reflected clearly and cleanly. Now day in and day out, you’ll have seen me changing the code to keep it fresh and to make it express, as well as I can manage, my design ideas. That’s what refactoring…