The Code Womble and the art of refactoring.
Tuesday 22 July 2008The motto of the Wombles of Wimbledon common, from the books of Elisabeth Beresford and children’s TV show of the 1970s, was to “Make Good Use of Bad Rubbish”. Why have I mentioned this on a technology blog?
Well recently I have been refactoring one of our php applications, in the hope we can resell it to a wider audience than originaly intended, as well as adding extra features to the original application. Whilst writing these updates it struck me that wombling provides an excellent analogy for the process of making a good, reusable, application out of a more disorganised one. We have the “code monkey” term for developing so why not “code womble” for someone refactoring. After all refactoring code is just another term for the process of recycling our old applications, it’s not going to save the earth but it does provide a more agile development process.
