by Patrick Logan
October 2003

I was working on a team at Intel building video conferencing systems. The original product had been pretty literally slammed together for 16-bit windows systems. (Yes, this was some time ago.) I joined the group after the first release had been shipped.

After working on some not very well designed code for a few months, one of my bosses (had a couple of them) asked if I wanted to work on a new team re-implementing for 32-bit windows. Knowing there was no way much of the existing code could be ported directly (too many “globals” for communicating directly between DLLs), I saw this as a great opportunity.

I worked on the conference establishment code first. I took bits and pieces of the exiting code or at least logic and embedded it within a domain-specific vocabulary. E.g. seeing in the code several ways to establish a call, and a lot of IF/ELSE and SWITCH to keep those paths separate, I created a Call object. The Call was used to establish a connection, with subclasses for TCP/IP, ISDN, etc. I also separated out the code for where the call comes from (i.e. where do you get the information to make the call?)

Not long after the benefits of this refactoring paid off. Some marketing guy wanted a demo, and he wanted some new features, in particular to establish a call from an address book, make the connection via TAPI, etc. The 16-bit team just gave up, they did not have the time or people to devote to untangling the code for these new features. In the 32-bit case, two of us did the work in about a day elapsed time.

A guy new to the project, but familiar with TAPI, was able to create a couple new subclasses with the expected interface. I did some very minor tweaking of the existing interfaces (which then made the subsequent development for the system even more reusable).

So in this case refactoring with the domain in mind took a project’s desired new features from impossible to fit into the schedule to “piece of cake”, which got a fair bit of notice in the organization.

©2003, Patrick Logan