How often should you refactor code in agile development?

1 Why refactor code?

Refactoring code can be incredibly beneficial for agile teams, as it can reduce technical debt, improve code quality, performance, and reliability, as well as enhance code readability and understandability. Plus, refactoring facilitates code reuse and extensibility, simplifies testing and debugging, and helps align code with business needs and user feedback.

2 When to refactor code?

There is no definitive answer to how often you should refactor code in agile development, as it depends on various factors such as the size and complexity of the project, the skill and experience of the developers, the quality of the existing code, and feedback from stakeholders. Nevertheless, general principles and best practices can be applied, such as refactoring code as soon as a code smell is spotted. Code smells are signs of potential problems or defects in the code, such as duplicate code, long methods, large classes, and tight coupling. Additionally, it's advised to refactor code before adding new features or fixing bugs to make the code easier to modify and maintain. This is known as the "red-green-refactor" cycle in test-driven development (TDD). Refactoring should be done regularly and incrementally to avoid accumulating technical debt. This is consistent with the agile principle of delivering working software frequently and continuously. Lastly, automated tools and tests should be utilized when refactoring to speed up the process and ensure that the code still works as expected. Examples of automated tools are IDEs, code analyzers, and linters. Examples of tests are unit tests, integration tests, and regression tests.

3 How to refactor code?

Refactoring code is not a random or arbitrary activity; it follows a systematic and disciplined approach, using techniques and patterns such as extracting methods or classes, renaming variables or methods, moving fields or methods, replacing conditional logic with polymorphism, and introducing design patterns. In order to refactor code effectively, you should first identify the code smell or problem that needs to be fixed or improved. Then, select the appropriate refactoring technique or pattern that can solve or improve it. After that, apply the refactoring technique or pattern carefully and incrementally with automated tools and tests if possible. Finally, verify that the refactoring did not change the functionality or behavior of the code by using tests and code reviews. This process should be repeated until you are satisfied with the result or until you reach the time or budget limit.