Refactoring organizations – refactoring code

Today I was struck by the similarities between rewriting code (as opposed to refactoring it) and how many companies reorganize.

When I was a young programmer and the code I had written was a mess I thought that if I just got the chance to rewrite everything it would then work better. Out with the old, and start on a blank sheet.

Exiting TDDoc, entering Bumblebee

History
A couple of years ago I got extremely annoyed when I had to write a word document with basically a copy of the code I had written.

There was to be a lot of copy’n'pasted code, runtime values etc and the knowledge that I would have to go through everything again a couple of weeks later because of smaller changes in the code.

I of course argued that there were a lot of test cases describing the system, but the client wouldn’t accept that for documentation.

Since most of the information that would go in that document was available in the test cases, I felt that there had to be a way to get that data into something more human friendly.