Refactoring is not explicitly to address requirements, but it is vital for overall health of the system, and to ensure future ability to respond to change.
Thus we need to find the right balance between desirable refactoring and less desirable - experience is the key guide here, and fortunately there are a lot of positive experiences available. Simple guidelines such as not mixing refactoring changes in the same change set as a feature implementation or a bug fix help significantly.
Conclusion
Requirements are vital for effective software development - ensuring that when we climb our ladder we find it is leaning against the right wall! Iterative development helps significantly to address this by ensuring improved feedback. And the other agile processes all help to contribute to this.
By tweaking slightly the traditional SCM principles which are so valuable, and applying agile and lean thinking, we can be even more effective in our SCM.
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About the author
Robert Cowham has long been interested in software configuration management while retaining the attitude of a generalist with experience and skills in many aspects of software development. A regular presenter at conferences, he authored the Agile SCM column within the CM Journal together with Brad Appleton and Steve Berczuk. His day job is as Services Director for Square Mile Systems whose main focus is on skills and techniques for infrastructure configuration management and DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) - applying configuration management principles to hardware documentation and implementation as well as mapping ITIL services to the underlying layers.
About the author
Brad Appleton is a software CM/ALM solution architect and lean/agile development champion at a large telecommunications company. Currently he helps projects and teams adopt and apply lean/agile development and CM/ALM practices and tools. He is coauthor of the bookSoftware Configuration Management Patterns, a columnist in The CM Journal and The Agile Journal at CMCrossroads.com, and a former section editor for The C++ Report. You can read Brad's blog at blog.bradapp.net.
About the author
Steve Berczuk is an engineer and ScrumMaster at Humedica where he's helping to build next-generation SaaS-based clinical informatics applications. The author of Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration, he is a recognized expert in software configuration management and agile software development. Steve is passionate about helping teams work effectively to produce quality software. He has an M.S. in operations research from Stanford University and an S.B. in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and is a certified, practicing ScrumMaster. Contact Steve at steve@berczuk.com or visit berczuk.com and follow his blog at blog.berczuk.com.
