This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Small Steps
Once upon a time a young, bright programmer was attending an intensive testing and refactoring workshop I was teaching. Everyone in this class was participating in a coding challenge that involved refactoring code with nearly all of the coding smells (see Chapter 4, 37) described in this book and in Refactoring [F]. During this challenge, pairs of programmers must discover a smell, find a refactoring for the smell, and demonstrate the refactoring by programming it on a projector while the rest of the classes watches.
At about five minutes before noon, the class had been refactoring for nearly an hour. Since lunch had already been brought into the room, I asked if anyone had a small refactoring they'd like to complete before we broke for lunch. The young programmer raised his hand and said he had a small refactoring in mind. Without mentioning a specific smell or associated refactoring, this fellow described a rather large problem in the code and explained what he intended to do to fix it. A few students expressed their doubt that such a problem could be fixed in only five minutes, but the programmer insisted that he could complete the work, so we all agreed to let him and his pair partner try it.
Five minutes pass very quickly when you're refactoring something that is complicated.
The programmer and his partner found that after moving and altering some code, many of the unit tests were now failing. Failing unit tests show up as a big red bar in the unit-testing tool, which looks awfully big and red when it is being projected onto a large screen. As the programmers attempted to fix the broken unit tests, one by one people began to leave so they could eat lunch at a nearby table. Fifteen minutes later I took a break too. As I stood in the lunch line, I watched the programming action on the projector.
Twenty minutes into their work, the big red bar still hadn't turned green (which signals that all tests are passing). At that point the young programmer and his partner got up to get some food. Then they quickly returned to the computer. Many of us watched as one programmer attempted to eat his lunch with one hand while continuing to refactor with the other. Meanwhile, the minutes were ticking by.
At ten minutes to one (nearly fifty-five minutes after beginning their refactoring), the big red bar turned green. The refactoring was complete. As the class reassembled, I asked everyone what had gone wrong. The young programmer provided the answer: he had not taken small steps. By combining several refactorings into a single, large step, he thought he would go faster; but just the opposite was true. Each big step generated failures in the unit tests, which took a good deal of time to fix, not to mention that some of the fixes needed to be undone during later steps.
Many of us have had similar experiences—we take steps that are too large and then struggle for minutes, hours, or even days to get back to a green bar. The better I get at refactoring, the more I proceed by taking very small, safe steps. In fact, the green bar has become a gyroscope, a device that helps me stay on course. If the bar stays red for too long—more than a few minutes—I know that I'm not taking small enough steps. Then I backtrack and begin again. I nearly always find smaller, simpler steps I can take that will get me to my goal faster than if I'd taken bigger steps.