This post is specifically intended to Project Managers although developers and testers can also get reasonable inputs from this post. Generally projects tend to accumulate a lot
of technical debt over time if refactoring is not applied and if good coding
practices are not followed. It is
imperative that as a Project Manager you should understand this and deal with
it effectively. This is especially true
in an Agile Project, where there is constant delivery of features and you would
be surprised how quickly code quality can take a beating in if proper measures
are not taken. So what are the signs you
can observe that your project’s code needs refactoring and what you can do
about it?
·
Team is
taking more time than expected to deliver features
o This is
probably the number one smell that a Project Manager can look out for in a
project. As a Project Manager you sense
that a certain feature should not take so much time, yet it takes that time. You talk to the team and they often give you
a detailed explanation of how much change the feature needs to undergo and how
it affects other features. That is one
of the sure smell that indicates that the code needs refactoring
·
Plenty of
bug fixes after delivery
o On one end,
the code delivery is being delayed and at another end, there will be a lot of
bugs too after delivery. If you have
observed this, then it is a sure sign that your project’s code needs
refactoring.
·
Build
Quality is on a decreasing trend
o This is one
of the excellent smells that surely indicate the need for refactoring. If we try to build on bad code, the code
quality will get reduced and this trend continues till we attempt to put a stop
to it. If you observe this as a Project
Manager, then you need to put a stop to it.
