Technical Debt Has a Direction: Why Paying It Down in the Wrong Order Makes Things Worse

The standard advice is to “pay down technical debt.” Rarely discussed is that debt has topology — and tackling the…

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Ineffective Java

Perhaps I can be replaced by a robot for code review. There are some bits of feedback I find myself…

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Making Refactoring Work

A recent academic study raises some questions about how useful and how important refactoring really is. The researchers found that…

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Thoughts about TDD and how to use it for untested legacy code

Prologue My personal experiences with TDD mostly match with the others on the internet, in short, TDD is good. It…

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You can’t Refactor your way out of every Problem

Refactoring is a disciplined way to clarify, retain or restore the design of a system as you make changes, and…

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What Refactoring is, and what it isn’t

Sometimes a programmer will come to me and explain that they don’t like the design of something and that “we’re…

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Don’t rewrite Your Application

When stuck with a legacy code base you’ll hear the claim “We’ll have to rewrite this from scratch in order…

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