How do you refactor and evolve your object-oriented framework to adapt to changing requirements and feedback?

Object-oriented design is a powerful way to create reusable, modular, and maintainable software. But how do you keep your object-oriented framework up to date with changing requirements and feedback from users, clients, or stakeholders? In this article, you'll learn some practical tips and techniques to refactor and evolve your framework without breaking existing functionality or compromising quality.

1 What is refactoring?

Refactoring is the process of improving the internal structure and design of your code without changing its external behavior or functionality. Refactoring aims to make your code more readable, understandable, testable, and maintainable. Refactoring can also help you identify and fix bugs, reduce complexity, eliminate duplication, and enhance performance.

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Tural Suleymani

Chief Software Engineering Consultant | Senior .NET Developer | Udemy Instructor | Microsoft MVP | 2x C# Corner MVP | MCSD | Tech & Youtube Content Creator | Speaker
The purposes of refactoring : 1) maintainability 2) understandability 3) extendability Making code blocks smaller in some cases is not refactoring. You can't measure your refactoring just reducing the amount of code. Sometimes it is better to leave it to be "big" rather than "smaller"
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Paulo Zemek

Software Engineer - I talk to computers and they understand me even without AI, we just speak the same language
Although we might prefer to avoid changing external behavior, it is a very common case that the refactoring will, in fact, change the external behavior... especially when the API was seen as over-complicated to use, or when there are security issues with the original implementation being refactored.
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2 Why refactor your framework?

Your framework is the foundation of your software system, providing the core components, interfaces, relationships, and behaviors of your objects. It also supplies common functionality and services that other parts of your system can use. To ensure your framework is consistent, coherent, and adaptable to changing requirements and feedback, refactoring can help you remove unnecessary or outdated features or classes, simplify or reorganize classes and methods to make them more cohesive and less coupled, apply design patterns or principles to improve quality and flexibility, as well as add or modify features or classes to support new or changing requirements.

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Paulo Zemek

Software Engineer - I talk to computers and they understand me even without AI, we just speak the same language
The topic is "Why refactor your framework" but it starts by explaining what is a framework. In my opinion, what is a framework should be a topic on its own. Then, the why refactor a framework is really brief, as the text continues with the benefits of refactoring. In fact there is so little about "why refactor" that maybe such a topic shouldn't exist at all.
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3 How to refactor your framework?

Refactoring your framework is an ongoing, iterative process that should be done whenever code smells, technical debt, or low quality is noticed, or when new or changing requirements or feedback affect its design or functionality. To refactor your framework effectively, you must identify the scope and goals of the refactoring, plan and prioritize tasks, test and backup code before refactoring, apply and review changes, and handle any unexpected issues or challenges. Additionally, you should measure progress and results, balance refactoring efforts with other development activities, verify that external behavior or functionality is not changed, and document and communicate changes.

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Tural Suleymani

Chief Software Engineering Consultant | Senior .NET Developer | Udemy Instructor | Microsoft MVP | 2x C# Corner MVP | MCSD | Tech & Youtube Content Creator | Speaker
I think the topic should be called "Refactoring in borders of your framework". You can divide it into high-level and detailed refactoring levels. The high-level refactoring touches the building blocks of your application, their communication, and their high-level contracts. Detailed refactoring is exactly the process of restoring inside a module/class/group of classes.
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4 How to evolve your framework?

Refactoring alone is not enough to keep your framework up to date with changing requirements and feedback. To effectively evolve your framework and deliver more value, you should analyze the new or changing requirements or feedback to understand the sources, implications, impacts, trade-offs, and risks involved. Then, you should design and prototype your framework evolution with alternatives and options in mind. Finally, you should implement and deploy your framework evolution, ensure its quality and reliability, document it, communicate it, and monitor and support it after deployment. Evolving your framework can help you stay ahead of the competition and innovation while providing more satisfaction to users, clients, or stakeholders.

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5 How to balance refactoring and evolving your framework?

Refactoring and evolving your framework are both essential and complementary activities to help maintain and improve your software system, but they require time, effort, and resources that can affect your development schedule, budget, and scope. To optimize the process and deliver a high-quality, adaptable, and maintainable software system, you need to consider factors such as the urgency of new or changing requirements or feedback, the complexity and stability of your existing framework, and the availability and capability of your development team. Assessing the criticality of new feedback for users, clients or stakeholders; how easy it is to refactor or evolve your existing framework; how much technical debt or code smells you have; how much time and resources you have available; as well as the skill level of developers can help you find the right balance between refactoring and evolving your framework.

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