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In many projects, there is code which is so bad that no one wants to touch it. Eventually, the consensus is “we need to rewrite this from scratch”.

TL&DR: Never do this in one big step. Break it down into 1-4 hour work pieces. Do each on the side while doing your normal work. Start today, not when you need to add a feature to or fix a bug in the messy code.

How to Make Rewrites Work

The goals what we need to achieve:

• Doing feature work during the rewrite must be easy.
• The new code must be substantially better.
• It would be great if we could stop halfway. Not that we have to, but the choice would be valuable.

If you think about this from a customer perspective: They pay you for (working) features, not for keeping your work area clean. The latter is a given. How would you feel if your favorite restaurant would put “Cleaning spillover: $50” on your next bill?

“Stop the world” rewrites should be avoided. They are also incredibly dangerous. Imagine, you estimate the rewrite takes two weeks. After two weeks, you notice you need more time. How much? Well … one week … maybe? You get another week. During which you find something unexpected which gives you an idea why the code was so messy in the first place. What now? Ask for a month more? Or admit defeat? Imagine how the meeting will go where you explain to your manager the situation. You have already spent 15 days on this. If you stop now, those will be wasted. Your lifetime will be wasted. And on top of this, you will still have the bad code. You will have spent a lot of money and gained nothing at all.

That’s why the rewrite must have a manageable impact on the productiveness of the team. Not negligible, but we must always stay in control on how we spend our effort.

The easiest and most reliable ways to make code better is to cut it into smaller pieces and to add unit tests on the way. A few lines of code are always easier to understand than a thousand. Tests document our expectations in ways that nothing else can.

Example

You have this god class that loads data from several database tables, processes it and then pumps the output into many other tables and external services.

Find the code which processes the data and move it into a new class. All fields become constructor parameters, all local variables become method parameters. You now have a simpler god class and a transformer. Write one or two unit tests for the transformer. Make sure you don’t need a database connection – if the transformer fetches more data, move that into a new helper and pass it as constructor parameter. Or load all the data in advance and pass a map into the transformer.

Let’s see what we did in more abstract terms.

How to rewrite bad code

In general, find an isolated area of functionality (configuration, extracting data, validation, transforming or loading into destination) and cut it out with the least amount of changes elsewhere. Ideally, you should use your IDE’s refactoring “move to new method in a new class.”

What have we achieved:

• We cut the complicated mess into two pieces, one much easier to understand than before.
• We have invested just a little bit of time.
• We now understand the mess a bit better.
• The remaining mess is less code, making it easier to deal with in the future.
• We now have more code under test than before.
• The extracted code is much, much easier and faster to test than the old mess.
• When there is a bug in the extracted code, we are now much more efficient to write a test for it and fix it.
• There is only a small risk that we introduced new bugs or even none when we used a refactoring.
• We can merge this into the shared/production branch right away. No need for a long-living rewrite branch.
• If it is valuable, we can add more tests. But we don’t have to. This gives us options.

Rinse & repeat. After a few times of this, you will begin to understand why the old code is messy. But at that time, you will have moved all the irrelevant stuff to unit tested code. So fixing the core of the mess will be much easier because now,

• it’s much less code to deal with,
• a lot of complexity will be gone,
• many unit tests have your back, and
• you will have begun to understand this code despite it’s lack of good documentation and it’s messiness.

The best parts:

• No additional stress when doing it this way.
• If you make a mistake, you won’t have wasted a lot of the client’s money AND your teams lifetime AND your reputation AND you can easily revert it.
• You can stop at any time – there is never a “if we stop now, it’s all for naught” situation.
• Several people can do this in parallel with just a little bit of coordination.
• Management and customers are fine with tidying up for a few hours every week.
• If something else is more important, you can switch focus. If the customer needs a new feature here, you can spend more time extracting the least messy stuff because it will make you more efficient. Or not. Again, you get a choice that you didn’t have before.
• You now have something valuable you can work on when you’re blocked for one hour.
• You get to fix it (eventually).
• At the end, everyone will be happy.

It just takes a bit longer from start to finish. Treat yourself to a bag of sweets when the mess is good enough. You deserve it.

If you’re a manager: Organize lunch/dinner for the whole team. They deserve it.

Next, let us look at whether we should do this at all.

Why We Should Rewrite

Rewrites don’t bring immediate business value. From a developer perspective, the rewrite is absolutely necessary. From a customer perspective, it’s a waste of time: “Spend my money to get the same functionality?”

Cleanliness

So let’s think about this as cleanliness. Everyone has to clean their room, desk, body once in a while. You don’t have to shower three times a day. But once a week is definitely not enough. So there is a sweet spot between several times a day and once per week.

Why? How? When?

Why do we do it? Because dirt accumulates over time and if you don’t tidy up regularly, the cost of tiding up suddenly explodes PLUS you won’t be able to do your work efficiently.

How long do we do it? You shower for 10 – 30 minutes, not a whole day. So spend at most 10% of your working time on this. I find that half an hour every day is working great.

When do we start? Now. Really. Right now. Don’t let the dirt evolve into cancer and kill you. Or in software terms: Which one is better?

1. You start improving the worst part of your code base today. After a few fixing rounds, you get a high priority bug/feature which has to be fixed/implemented right now
2. You get a high priority bug/feature which has to be fixed/implemented right now. It’s in the worst part of the code base. You haven’t done any tidying there, yet.

The lesson here is: Tidy up regularly and in short bursts. Focus on where you expect changes in the near future over code that hasn’t changed for a long time.

Looking at software in general: Spending several consecutive days on cleanup is too much. Going without cleanup for a week and the software will soon starts to reek. Aim for at least one hour per week and at most four hours.

Least Messy

Apply this to rewrites: Today, you have a huge mess. Find a part in it that is least “messy” and fix that. Some time later, depending on your workload, do it again.

I define “least messy” like this:

• Most independent – changes here will affect the least amount of code.
• Easiest to understand – try to find something that does one thing only.
• Can be extracted within one to four hours of work, including at least one new unit test.

We now know how to rewrite and when to do it. But one question is still open: What makes rewrites fail?

Why Rewrite From Scratch Fails

Many developers believe that rewrite from scratch is the only possible solution for really bad code. More importantly, they think they can fix it within a certain – usually low – time budget. We have the code to guide us, right? Should be easier second time around, right? With all that we’ve learned since?

Usually not. You don’t understand the code: this is the main reason why you want to scrap it! It has hidden issues which drive the “badness”. You don’t have a reliable list of all features. Lastly, you either have to lie to your manager about the effort or you won’t get permission.

Let’s look at each of those in more detail.

Bad code is hard to understand

The first reason why you want to rewrite from scratch is that you don’t understand the bad code. This makes it harder to change and drives your urge to get rid of it.

For the same reason, it will also slow you down during the rewrite. The rule of thumb with bad code is: “If it took N hours to write the first time, it will take ~N hours to rewrite from scratch”. This only applies when

• you have a competent team,
• everyone involved in writing the bad code is still there.

You can do better, if

• all the requirements that ever went into this code are readily available,
• there is good documentation,
• not much time has passed since the time the mess was created.

But usually, the messy code is in this state because the first two were missing the first time around and the latter isn’t true since no one dared to touch the code because it always caused problems.

For these reasons, the bad code will slow you down instead of helping you during the rewrite. But that’s not all.

Hidden Design Issues

Why is the code so bad? There is a reason for that. No matter how bad it looks today, it was written my smart, competent people just like you. What happened?

Often, it was written with assumptions that turned out to be somewhat wrong. Not totally off target, just not spot on. Like how complex the underlying problem is. The original design didn’t solve the problem in an efficient way. The code didn’t work well to begin with, time pressure built up, eventually the team had to move on. Code had to be made to work “somehow” to meet a deadline.

Do you understand today where you went wrong the first time? Do you know how to solve it, now? Without this, your attempt to rewrite will produce “bad code, version 2”. Or at best “slightly better code, way over budget”. In addition to those two, you might even know less today than the first time.

Lack of Information

The third reason is that you don’t have good documentation. The knowledge of most of the features will be lost or hidden in old bug/feature tickets and outdated wiki pages.

Since you can’t trust the code, you will have to painstakingly rebuild the knowledge that went into the first version without many of the information sources you had the first time. Many developers involved in the first version have left. Even if they are still around: The reasons for most of the decisions will be long forgotten by now.

Therefore information wise, you probably start worse off than when someone made this mess the first time. Which was some time ago. Bad code festered into an ugly mess of thousands of lines of code, workarounds and hasty bug fixes. How long will it take to clean this up?

Realistic Estimates

The last reason is that a rewrite takes longer than a few days. If this wasn’t the case, you’d have solved the problem already – no one argues about a rewrite that takes just a few hours.

Here, we have a psychological problem. No one knows how long it took to write the original code – it “evolved.” Maybe a month? Half a year?

Well, we know better this time, so it has to take less time. We do? Why? Okay, how much less? Well … this code is so bad, it hurts so much … it has to go! … it’s embarrassing to even talk about this … how much is management willing to … and you’re doomed. Instead of giving an honest estimate, you try to find a number that will green-light the attempt. Or you give an honest estimate and management will (correctly) say “No.”

Challenges

You will face many challenges. I’ve listed suggestions how to handle them.

My boss/client won’t let me

Argue that you need time to clean your work area, just like a carpenter needs to sweep the chips from the the floor between projects. When too much dirt accumulates, you can’t work quickly or safely. Which means new features will either be more expensive or they will have more bugs.

We don’t have time for this!

One picture says more then a thousand words in this case: https://hakanforss.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/are-you-too-busy-to-improve/

It’s so bad, we can’t fix individual parts of it!

Well, let me know how it went.

For everyone else: This is in production. So it can’t be that bad. As in it’s not killing you right now. It’s just very painful and risky to make changes there. Despite how bad the whole is, a lot of thought and effort went into the individual changes. Often more than elsewhere because extra care was taken since this was a dangerous area. This also means that it would be a terrible waste to throw everything away just because it looks a like huge reeking dump of garbage from a distance. You know how they fix oil spills? The put a barrier up and then, it’s one dirty bird / beach at a time.

So look at the messy code. Try to see what you can salvage today. Keep all the good stuff that you can reuse. Clean it. Keep chipping away at the huge pile. Move carefully so it can’t come crashing down. As your knowledge grows, the remaining work shrinks. Eventually, you will be able to replace whole code paths. And one day, guaranteed, the huge pile will become a molehill that you can either stomp into the ground with the heel of your boot or … ignore.

While I’m at it, let me just fix this as well!

You will often feel the urge to go on cleaning after you started. Just one more warning. Oh, and I can extract this, now! And I know how to write five more unit tests.

Set a time limit and learn to stick to it. If you have more ideas how to improve things, write them down. A comment in the code works well since someone else might pick it up. If you clean code for three days, other people won’t praise you. Imagine it the other way around: There are so many important things to do right now and your colleague just spent three days cleaning up compiler warnings?

Also, remember the 80:20 rule: Most clean ups will only take a bit of time. As soon as you get in the “hard to fix” area, you’re spending more and more effort. Eventually, the clean up will cost more than you’ll ever benefit from it. Keeping it time boxed will prevent you from falling into this trap.

I don’t have time to write a unit test

Come back when you have. Adding tests is an important part of the work. It’s like a carpenter sweeping the chips under a rug. You need this test. Because …

Writing the unit test takes ages

Excellent! You have found a way to measure whether you’re doing it right or wrong. If writing the new unit test is hard, there is a problem that you don’t understand yet. The code you extracted has turned out to be much more dangerous than you thought. Great! Close your eyes and focus on that feeling. Learn to recognize it as early as possible. This emotion will become one of the most valuable tools in your career. Whenever you feel it, stop immediately. Get up. Get a coffee. Stare at the wall. Ask yourself “Why am I feeling this? Which mistake am I about to make?”

Now let’s look at reasons why the unit test is so hard to write.

The unit test needs a lot of setup

This indicates that you have an integration test, not a unit test. You probably failed to locate what I called “least messy” above. Document your findings and revert. Try to find a part to extract that has fewer dependencies.

The unit test needs complicated data structures

Looks like you need to improve the design of the data model. Check how you can make the different data classes more independent of each other. For example, if you want to write tests for the address of an invoice, you shouldn’t need order items. If improving your data model will make it more efficient to write the tests, stop the tidying here and clean the data model instead.

Option #2: Consider creating a test fixture with test data builders for your model classes. The builders should produce standard test cases. In your tests, you create the builder, then modify just the fields that your test needs and call build() to get a valid instance of your complex model.

Writing the unit test fails for another reason

Write a comment in a text editor what you tried and why it failed. Include all useful information including class names and stack traces. Revert your changes. Commit the comment.

You really can’t achieve much more here. Stop for now, do a feature, and resume tidying tomorrow. If you have an idea then how to improve this code: Do it. If not, tidy up elsewhere.

I can’t find anything to extract

Try to extract fewer lines of code. Sometimes, extracting a single line into a method with a good name helps tremendously understanding complex code. This is counter intuitive: How can turning one line into four make the code easier to understand? Because how the brain works: You brain doesn’t read characters, it looks for indentation. Reading a good method name is faster and more efficient than running a 80 character expression in your head.

Next, sort each code line into “fetching data from somewhere”, “transforming the data” and “loading the data into something”. For methods that mix two or three of those, try to split the method into two or three methods or classes where each does just one thing.

Conclusion

The net effect of the above is that software developers tend to underestimate rewrites. The result: the rewrite costs much more than expected. Management is unhappy: “just can’t trust the estimates of developers”. Developers are unhappy: “management will not allow us to do this again” and “I put so much effort into this and everyone hates me for it”. The customer is very, very unhappy (“I paid how much to get what I already have??? And what about … ?? You postponed it? I needed that this week! Do you have any idea how much revenue I lost …”).

So the only solution which will work most of the time:

• Cut the huge rewrite into small, manageable parts.
• Each part should slightly improve the situation.
• Add at least one unit test to each improved part.
• Spend a small amount of your weekly work time on tidying.
• Merge quickly.
• Start today.

See Also

• Tidy First? by Kent Beck
• Tidy First? Kent Beck on Refactoring (YouTube)
• Books by Robert C. Martin about Clean Code