Situated Geekery

My favorite part is the refactoring.

Sometimes I do it by itself, as in the DoubleDawg. Mostly, though, I do it inline as part of the TDD discipline. I love it either way, and I can’t explain why.

Loving refactoring so openly is good good good when I’m coaching: other people can’t help but watch what I’m doing and then try to see if it’s really as fun as all that. (It is.)

But once a team jumps into the act itself, there’s a question that just has to pop into some minds, especially the ones who feel it’s very important to, you know, ship:

How Do I Know When I’m Done Refactoring?

“You’re done refactoring when the code meets our current standard of coding excellence.”

I’m always surprised when someone just nods their head to this and turns away, as if I’ve actually given an answer. I guess questions can sometimes be pro forma gestures, too.

Anyway, that’s a terrible answer, but on good days it leads right to the next question: What’s our current standard of coding excellence?

The Challenges Of Standard-Setting

Setting standards seems to cry out for the clarity and detail of a perfectly written set of rules. Ya know? If we just sat down and carefully listed all the things you can do, and all the things you can’t do, using maximum simplicity and maximum clarity, we’d have a perfect standard.

Then there are those of us who have either studied law, or babysat a truculent nine-year-old, or both.

1. We want our rules to cover everything, but only a small handful of situations can really be described that way.
2. We want our rules to be stable, but time and experience make mockery of our earlier attempts, time and again.
3. We want our rules to be axiomatic, but as Kurt Godel demonstrated, any such that are sufficiently powerful to be of interest are also suffiicently powerful to contain undecidable propositions.
4. We want our rules to be simple and no-nonsense, but as any handy nine-year-old can demonstrate, when it comes to misinterpretation, where there’s a will there’s a way.

So? What to do?
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The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work

When I first studied the XP process, I was struck by Kent Beck’s ability to construct rules that were as perfectly detailed as they could be, but no further.

“Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work” is a wonderful example of this.

Without a rigorous definition of simplest, possibly, and work, a computer would find this rule absolutely empty. All the important words in the rule are left to individual human judgment. Defining them would take years and years and would still fail. (Read the XP list some time.)

But the rule works in spite of the uncertainty, because it contains an implicit ‘you’ for each of the ambiguous words. Simplest means simplest-to-you, and possibly means possibly-to-you, and work means work-the-way-you-want.

Notice that this kind of rule completely evades the problems list from above. Clever.

My Rule For Refactoring

You are done refactoring when you’re ready to project the code onto the wall for the whole team to see.

This rule works just like the XP ones: it is full of opinion, judgment, and you-ness.

This rule works best when its coupled with actual code projection, along the lines of a lottery learning session.

I like that we simultaneously release the team, empowering them to decide for themselves what’s enough, and also situate them, showing them that their coding standard is going to be super-local, theirs and theirs alone.

I also love that I get to watch the actual meaning of that rule change. Every actual projected code session makes changes to the underlying meaning, and so do most pairing sessions between a junior and a senior.

Use The Projector Rule

To Identify The Moving Target Code Standard