Do you use any metrics to make a decision which parts of the code (classes, modules, libraries) shall be consolidated or refactored next?
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Do you use any metrics to make a decision which parts of the code (classes, modules, libraries) shall be consolidated or refactored next?
I don’t use any metrics which can be calculated automatically.
I use code smells and similar heuristics to detect bad code, and then I’ll fix it as soon as I have noticed it. I don’t have any checklist for looking problems – mostly it’s a gut feeling that ‘this code looks messy’ and then reasoning that why it is messy and figuring out a solution. Simple refactorings like giving a more descriptive name to a variable or extracting a method take only a few seconds. More intensive refactorings, such as extracting a class, might take up to a an hour or two (in which case I might leave a TODO comment and refactor it later).
One important heuristic that I use is Single Responsibility Principle. It makes the classes nicely cohesive. In some cases I use the size of the class in lines of code as a heuristic for looking more carefully, whether a class has multiple responsibilities. In my current project I’ve noticed that when writing Java, most of the classes will be less than 100 lines long, and often when the size approaches 200 lines, the class does many unrelated things and it is possible to split it up, so as to get more focused cohesive classes.