In our continuing conversation about refactoring, I want to go a little abstract today, and talk about chunking and naming. Naturally, a topic thisi important has already been addressed by a stupid joke in the movie Airplane!, so we’ll start there. A passenger is approached by a steward, asking if he might be able to […]
Chunking and Naming Read More »
Continuing on our conversation about large-scale transformations, I want to talk about change-harvesting’s “bias for action” and tell you a weird thing I did in kontentment the last couple of days. Change-harvesting takes the stance that our most reliable strategy for change is a highly iterative process of act-look-think, in roughly equal proportions, repeated in
Large-Scale Transformation and the Bias for Action Read More »
Large-Scale Refactorings — given the recent refactoring-related muses, a respondent asked me to talk about large or larger scale refactoring work. (I love it when people’s questions trigger my writing. Please do ask these things.) First things first, “large scale refactoring” is really a colloquial expression, a shorthand we sometimes use, but in my experience
Large-Scale Refactorings Read More »
Another small second-order refactoring for you today. I call it “narrow the question”. If you’re asking an object for data, ask for exactly what you want to know, instead of what you’d need to compute what you want to know. A very simple example: the PlayerView wants to disable/enable some of its controls when the
Second-Order Refactoring: Narrow The Question Read More »
As a hardcore user of TDD and refactoring, there are a number of what I think of as “second tier” refactorings that I use quite frequently. In one’s first intro to refactoring, one sees a lot of "rename", "re-order", "inline", and "extract". These are pretty potent tools, don’t get me wrong, but I think of
Second-Order Refactoring: Swap Supplier and Supply Read More »
Now we’ve seen these basic ideas, human, local, oriented, taken, and iterative. I want to use them in a particular way for a bit. Let’s take some practices we know we like, and work backwards, seeing if/how these "known-goods" relate to those ideas. Let’s talk about "Working By Stories" for this first one. I’ll describe
Working By Stories – A Change Harvester’s Take Read More »
TIme to take up “iterative”, the last, but by no means least, of the bywords of the change-harvesting worldview: human, local, oriented, taken, and iterative. Previous Posts in This Series Here: Human Change Local Change Oriented Change Taken Change The heart of the iterative approach is assuming change. We embrace it, we plan for it,
Iterative Change – What and Why Read More »
Human, local, oriented, taken, and iterative, those are the hallmarks of the change-harvester’s approach. This morning I want to tackle “taken”, which is about grounding the substance and approach of our changes to the situation that is already there. Want to catch up? Previous articles in the series here: Human Change Local Change Oriented Change
Taken Change – What and Why Read More »
The change-harvesting approach has these elements at its base: human, local, oriented, taken, and iterative. Today, I want to talk about what that adjective “oriented” means. Prior muses on human and local are here: Human Change: What and Why Local Change: What and Why We’ve said that leaning in to the humans in our systems
Oriented Change – What and Why Read More »
