> I also suspect that not all refactoring work is equal, and that most refactoring work don't result in any positive engineering or business improvements.
We have lots of old code in production, some 25 years old. Much of it written during the startup crunch, with little thought to extensibility and so on.
But it works.
So we have a rule to only cleanup/refactor code when we have a specific case which requires us to change it. If it requires a bit more than a minor change, we'll do a cleanup, refactor or rewrite depending on the circumstance.
Remove-tech-debt-as-you-go is how I approach the problem. Doing so ensures that removing tech debt is not done in a vacuum, disconnected from business needs.
We have lots of old code in production, some 25 years old. Much of it written during the startup crunch, with little thought to extensibility and so on.
But it works.
So we have a rule to only cleanup/refactor code when we have a specific case which requires us to change it. If it requires a bit more than a minor change, we'll do a cleanup, refactor or rewrite depending on the circumstance.