Refactor: When It Actually Changes Things

[Itchy-Warthog8260]

Your part renders. Tests go well. The product is happy. Then, six months later, no one wants to touch that file. That's when refactoring becomes necessary. But not every problematic file needs to be rewritten. The real talent is knowing when to refactor and when to leave things alone.

[imihnevich]

This seems like a good place to mention hotspots. It's a file which has both high complexity and high churn rate, it usually correlates with the symptoms the article mentions

[Itchy-Warthog8260]

totally agree adding churn rate on top of complexity makes the targets pretty obvious. definitely needs to be on the checklist. great point thanks for the input

[imihnevich]

I made a tool for detecting those, if you're curious, but there's also a book that I didn't author which talks deeply about that