Martin Fowler Discusses New Edition of Refactoring, Along With Thoughts on Evolutionary Architecture

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Nov 2, 2018

Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks and author of influential tech books, dives into his recent work on the updated edition of Refactoring. He explains how the core idea of small, incremental changes remains relevant. Martin shares insights on evolutionary architecture, highlighting its capacity for adaptability beyond microservices. He also discusses modern refactoring practices, the shift from traditional programming languages to more accessible options, and the challenges of deploying distributed systems in the ever-evolving landscape of software development.

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INSIGHT

Refactoring Is Language-Agnostic

Refactoring remains the practice of finding small, safe steps to make large changes without breaking code.
Martin rewrote the book to generalize refactoring beyond Java and give it longevity.

ADVICE

Pick Examples Readers Will Follow

Use a language readers understand when teaching refactorings so examples feel natural and instructive.
JavaScript lets you refactor both toward and away from objects, making it useful for modern examples.

INSIGHT

Core Techniques Transcend Paradigms

Core refactoring ideas like Extract Function remain essential across paradigms.
Many refactorings now include moving functions and data rather than only class edits.

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Martin Fowler chats about the work he’s done over the last couple of years on the rewrite of the original Refactorings book. He discusses how this thought process has changed and how that’s affected the new edition of the book. In addition to discussing Refactors, Martin and Wes discuss his thoughts on evolutionary architecture, team structures, and how the idea of refactors can be applied in larger architecture contexts. Why listen to this podcast: - Refactoring is the idea of trying to identify the sequence of small steps that allows you to make a big change. That core idea hasn’t changed. - Several new refactorings in the book deal with the idea of transforming data structures into other data structures, Combine Functions into Transform for example. - Several of the refactorings were removed or not added to the book in favor of adding them to a web edition of the book. - A lot of the early refactorings are like cleaning the dirt off the glass of a window. You just need them to be able to see where the hell you are and then you can start looking at the broader ones. - Refactorings can be applied broadly to architecture evolution. Two recent posts How to break a Monolith into Microservices, by Zhamak Dehghani, and How to extract a data-rich service from a monolith by Praful Todkar on MartinFowler.com deal with this specifically. - Evolutionary architecture is a broad principle that architecture is constantly changing. While related to Microservices, it’s not Microservices by another name. You could evolve towards or away from Microservices for example. More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2QbdHej You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Check the landing page on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2QbdHej