Refactoring Triage

With a large amount of code it’s a good idea to remember the concept of triage.

Here’s one potential triage scheme:

• Code which should be just deleted. This is not worth refactoring

  • Dead code which is not an active part of the application.

  • Bad functionality which complicates an application unnecessarily - negative value. See exponential complexity.

• Code which should be put into a well labelled folder but not substantially altered.

  • This is code which we might not be ready to rewrite yet but when we do it will be a complete re-write.

  • Main objective of refactoring in this case is make the code easy to identify and cleanly delete at a later date so the code doesn’t become dead code.

• Code which is core and needs tender loving care.

  • This is code which is of central importance to the application

  • There is no plan to replace the code and instead the code needs to be simplified and made so the entire team can understand it.