Fighting Technical Debt With Continuous Refactoring

React Day Berlin

React Day Berlin 2022

Alex Moldovan

A Framework for Managing Technical Debt

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Lessons for Building Resilient Codebases

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The harsh reality is that software development is messy. You start with the best tools, the best architecture and the best intentions, but quality inevitably degrades over time. Frontend code is particularly fragile in time as it sits at the intersection of product, design and engineering. A while ago I started asking myself if all codebases are destined to fail and become legacy or obsolete. Then I began collecting lessons from past wins and failures and noticed how important resilience was to the success of a long term project. Resilience is the ability of a codebase to survive through waves of chaotic development and unplanned changes. Resilience has less to do with the tools and frameworks you deploy, and more to do with the discipline of writing and maintaining clean code. Have you ever wondered how much work will be required to update the code you are writing today, 6 months from now? Let's see if we can answer that with a simple: "not too much".

Let’s face it: technical debt is inevitable and rewriting your code every 6 months is not an option. Refactoring is a complex topic that doesn't have a one-size-fits-all solution. Frontend applications are particularly sensitive because of frequent requirements and user flows changes. New abstractions, updated patterns and cleaning up those old functions - it all sounds great on paper, but it often fails in practice: todos accumulate, tickets end up rotting in the backlog and legacy code crops up in every corner of your codebase. So a process of continuous refactoring is the only weapon you have against tech debt.In the past three years, I’ve been exploring different strategies and processes for refactoring code. In this talk I will describe the key components of a framework for tackling refactoring and I will share some of the learnings accumulated along the way. Hopefully, this will help you in your quest of improving the code quality of your codebases.

Let’s face it: technical debt is inevitable and rewriting your code every 6 months is not an option. Refactoring is a complex topic that doesn't have a one-size-fits-all solution. Frontend applications are particularly sensitive because of frequent requirements and user flows changes. New abstractions, updated patterns and cleaning up those old functions - it all sounds great on paper, but it often fails in practice: todos accumulate, tickets end up rotting in the backlog and legacy code crops up in every corner of your codebase. So a process of continuous refactoring is the only weapon you have against tech debt. In the past three years, I’ve been exploring different strategies and processes for refactoring code. In this talk I will describe the key components of a framework for tackling refactoring and I will share some of the learnings accumulated along the way. Hopefully, this will help you in your quest of improving the code quality of your codebases.