Challenges of Re-factory

In the recent town-hall meeting, our vice president of application development mentioned that in her experience, usually applications will only become great in their version 3.0. That’s in terms of feature richness, usability, stability and performance.

This insight fits well with my own experience and observation. The implications are developers are spending a lot of their times doing re-factory, which means rewriting the underline implementations for the existing functions.

At the first glance, re-factory seems to be an awful thing: tedious, time-wasting, boring, but unavoidable. However, if we really want to tame this beast, we need to take a deep look at its origins and natures. And it may come out as a necessary and valuable way to improve the quality and the business values of our applications.