The benefits of OO aren’t obvious: Part IV of V, refactoring

Written by Nik

Previously I wrote:

Sometimes you work with something for so long that you forget that other people aren’t familiar with it. This happened recently talking to a friend of mine — “I’ve got no need for object orientation”, he said, and I was shocked. […] What, I wondered to myself, were the benefits of OO that he was missing? How could I persuade him that it does have a point? So here is my attempt to trawl my memory and see how I’ve changed in response to OO, and why I think it serves me (and my projects) better. In the end I’ve found that the benefits are real, but nothing I would have guessed at when I first started in this field.

I’ve already written about data hiding, separation of concerns and better testability. Now read on…

Refactoring

This is something that builds on all the items above. If you’ve worked on any piece of code for a length of time you’ll always have come to the point where you think “Damn, I really should have done that bit differently.” Refactoring is what you want to do here: “restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior”.

Refactoring is helped considerably by OO. “I already refactor,” says my non-OO friend, “I always make sure common code is in put into functions.” Which is good, but there’s a whole lot more to refactoring than that. Martin Fowler lists a vast number of options. But before I list my favourite refactorings (how sad is that? I have favourite refactorings) let me explain why this is so important, why it probably isn’t all entirely obvious, and how it relates to so much else here…

First, be aware that two people could both write outwardly identical applications but with their source totally different internally. At its most extreme, refactoring would enable you to evolve from one codebase to the other in lots of very small steps, at each step leaving you with the same working, stable, application. That’s much more than just putting common code into functions. If you think you already have the skill and technology to entirely change your codebase without changing anything outwardly then you’re a refactoring expert. If not, then you’ve got a lot to learn (and a lot of fun yet to have).

Second, refactoring is so important because it gives you a chance to improve your code. Unit testing (and indeed all testing) makes this possible. Test driven development isn’t just about test-first development, it’s also about refactoring. The last step of a TDD sequence is to refactor. You ensure your tests pass, you refactor, and you run your tests again, to make sure they still pass — to ensure you’ve not broken anything while refactoring. A suite of unit tests acts as scaffolding around your code, allowing you to rebuild parts of it without fear of the edifice collapsing. If you’ve made a mistake in your refactoring then the unit tests should show exactly whereabouts the problem is.

Third, taking the previous two together, you can make vast, sweeping changes to your codebase in tiny, safe steps. Simply break down the process into lots of small refactorings, and test after each one. This is how the apparently-impossible task of changing your entire codebase reliably is possible. In reality you’ll probably never want to change your entire codebase but you will want to change large chunks of it, and this is how you’d do it.

Fourth, you often find yourself needing to add a feature which seems reasonable to a client, but difficult to someone who understands the structure of the application. An excellent way to add the feature is to utilise refactoring as follows: refactor the software so that the addition of the feature does become a natural extension, and then add it. Martin Fowler gives an excellent worked example of this in the first couple of chapters of his book, which is (almost) worth the price of admission alone.

Now you can browse the refactoring catalogue linked to above (and here again), but here are some of my favourite refactorings…

  1. Rename variable. This is very trivial, and very easy, but all the better for it. Forgotten what a variable does? Give it a better name. It’s so easy to do, but so useful.
  2. Extract method. Never mind extracting common code into functions, I often find myself extracing one-off code into a single function (or “method”, as they’re called in OO) with a long and useful name. This is to make the original method much shorter, so I can see it all on one screen, and also so that it reads better. I no longer need to look at ten lines and translate them in my head into “…and then sort all the even numbered vertices into alphabetical order”. Instead I have a single method called sortEvenNumberedVerticesAlphabetically(). You think that’s silly? Maybe Java or VB.NET is your first language. Personally, English is my first language.
  3. Introduce null object [1, 2]. I don’t think ever used this, but I like it a lot because it’s just very interesting. The problem is that you’ve got special logic whenever a key object is null. For example, you need a basic billing plan by default, if the customer object isn’t set up and doesn’t have its own billing plan:

    if (customer == null)
    billing_plan = Plans.basic();
    else
    billing_plan = customer.getPlan();

    This is a small example, but it’s important to realise why this is undesirable: partly because each branch point is another potential source of error, and parly because your “null customer” logic isn’t just here, but is probably scattered all over your code. It would be better to have all the logic in one place, where it can be seen and managed and tested more easily. The solution is to introduce a null object — in this case a NullCustomer object such as this:

    public class NullCustomer
    {
    // ...probably lots missed out here.
    // Meanwhile the getPlan() method of NullCustomer
    // just returns the default basic plan...

    public Plan getPlan()
    {
    return Plans.basic();
    }
    }

    Every time we set up a customer we should now use this NullCustomer as a default rather than the non-specific null object. And our original if/then/else code can be reduced to this:

    billing_plan = customer.getPlan();

    That’s simpler and clearer, it doesn’t have any branches, and the logic for a null customer lives in one place.

Refactoring is a wonderful thing. And it’s even more wonderful if your IDE helps you. For .NET languages you can get the Refactor! plugin, and MSDN has video demo, too. All that code manipulation at the touch of a button!

All installments: