Evolutionary Database Design

by Pramod Sadalage and Martin Fowler

Over the last few years we've developed a number of techniques that allow a database design to evolve as an application develops. This is a very important capability for agile methodologies. The techniques rely on applying continuous integration and automated refactoring to database development, together with a close collaboration between DBAs and application developers. The techniques work in both pre-production and released systems.

January 2003

article

C-Refactory

So far refactoring tools have appeared for a number of languages. After Smalltalk's lead, we've seen several tools for Java and a couple for C#. One language conspicuous by its absence is C++, despite appeals. All this despite the fact that the first refactoring thesis was done by Bill Opdyke, who's background is in C++.

18 October 2003

bliki

DataClump

Whenever two or three values are gathered together - turn them into a $%#$%^ object.

-- Me (it was funnier with the voices)

This is one of my favorite CodeSmells from the refactoring book. You spot it when you constantly see the same few data items passed around together. start and end are a good example of a data clump wanting to be a range. Often data clumps are primitive values that nobody thinks to turn into an object.

bliki

EtymologyOfRefactoring

This question struck my mind a few times when writing the refactoring book. I knew the term was used within a fairly small community, so in order to discover the etymology of refactoring I talked to the people in that group (Ward Cunningham, Kent Beck, Bill Opdyke, John Brant, Don Roberts, Ralph Johnson...) to find what had led them to come up with the term.

10 September 2003

bliki

OpportunisticRefactoring

From the very beginning of when I started to talk and write about refactoring people have asked me how it should be incorporated into the wider software development process. Should there be refactoring phases in the software development lifecycle, what proportion of an iteration should be devoted to refactoring tasks, how should we figure out who should be assigned to refactoring duties? Although there are places for some scheduled refactoring efforts, I prefer to encourage refactoring as an opportunistic activity, done whenever and wherever code needs to cleaned up - by whoever.

1 November 2011

bliki

RefactoringMalapropism

Once a term known to only a few, "Refactoring" is commonly tossed around the computer industry. I like to think that I'm partly responsible for this and hope it's improved some programmers lives and some business's bottom lines. (Important point, I'm not the father or the inventor of refactoring - just a documenter.)

3 January 2004

bliki

StaticSubstitution

As I listen to our development teams talk about their work, one common theme is their dislike of things held in statics. Typically we see common services or components held in static variables with static initializers. One of the big problems with statics (in most languages) is you can't use polymorphism to substitute one implementation with another. This bits us a lot because we are great fans of testing - and to test well it's important to be able to replace services with a Service Stub.

20 October 2004

bliki