Refactoring Code Improves The Customer Experience
After posting about developers who don’t refactor being worthless, some people mentioned how users don’t care about refactored code, they only care about features.
@Hypn @mattjay @miscsecurity I agree. Users don't care what the code looks like only if it works.
— RΛY (@Raybeorn) July 1, 2013
I couldn’t agree more. Customers don’t care about refactored code. It isn’t something they can visually see. However, they do care about getting new features to play with and having bugs fixed.
If you never refactor code and only focus on implementing new features, something special happens to your code base; It becomes harder to work with. Being able to iterate fast and fixing bugs quickly are directly correlated to having a code base that is easy to work with.
The bigger your code base becomes the more complex it becomes. Once the code is overly complex, developers can’t implement features quickly. It is hard to find bugs in complicated code bases. If the purpose of your company is to iterate as fast as possible. Developers need to be given time to refactor.
In addition to making the code base easier to work with, refactoring has an additional advantage. As code is refactored developers identify better ways of doing things. They find ways to optimize code.
It is in both the developers and the companies best interest to refactor code.