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Re^3: Nobody Expects the Agile Imposition (Part VI): Architectureby sundialsvc4 (Abbot) |
on Jan 27, 2011 at 14:54 UTC ( [id://884564]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
To be quite frank, I believe that the essential difference between “refactoring” and “rewriting” is that one term is politically expedient, while the other term is not. In both cases, you are doing the exact same thing in terms of the code: you’re replacing the existing code with something altogether new, which renders the code inoperable (un-compileable) for an extended period of time and which must, in the end, be re-validated to verify that the new code works the same as the old. The term, “refactoring,” is currently sexy and implies improvement ... “making an already-good thing better” ... whereas “rewriting” (wrongly...) implies previous failure. I do admit to the reality that, sometimes, in order to get approval and funding to do what badly needs to be done, you are obliged to resort to “necessary euphemisms.” Like it or not, computer software is very fragile (and therefore, costly) stuff, simply because it is riddled with functional and data dependencies. It is, so to speak, “a house of cards,” which can only stand up to a very limited amount of “remodeling.” I simply think that this is ... the essential and unavoidable nature of the beast. It obligates us to try to do the best that we can, knowing that there are serious limits to that. I submit that there is no silver-bullet language or technique to be had. (He would rightly be a gadzillionaire who discovered it.) With regard to the point of “overdesign and customer needs,” there is the consideration that (a) the customer does not always know just where his business will take him; and (b) in any case, he is not a professional software builder and does not profess to be. Sometimes you do need to “go beyond what you discussed with the customer,” because in your professional judgment as a software engineer, those additional elements (for example...) create the foundations for future characteristics of the system that are reasonably foreseeable as well as engineering-practical. But, you need to be sure that you get all points about what the customer requests, and of what you have in turn decided to do, and every single subsequent change to the foregoing, in writing and signed-off and filed away for all eternity. Part of the (successful) argument for “frameworks” is that the cost of developing and maintaining them can be cost-amortized (or simply “unpaid-effort amortized”) among many projects that employ them ... thus allowing all of those projects to enjoy the full benefits without incurring the full costs. The use of frameworks imposes a certain specific “world view” upon the project, however ... namely, the world-view of that particular framework’s designers, quirks and oddities and all. Choose your project’s spouse very carefully. The project’s entire future direction is necessarily molded around that of the framework, and in a very rigid way, except to the extent that the project’s actual implementation might be, by deliberate choice, architecturally divided into (framework-based) “client” and (non framework-based) “server” portions. The cost/benefit analysis of using frameworks usually prevails in spite of this consideration, because so much of the constituent code in so many projects isn’t unique at all.
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