Lonely Planet Labs

Mob Refactor

Leon MesserschmidtLonely Planet author

In the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond popularized the words, otherwise known as Linus’ law that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.  Linus’ law is actually just a nice way of telling developers that two heads are better than one and it doesn’t only apply to open source.  Which brings us to the weekly Lonely Planet Mob Refactor.

Any sufficiently large code base will have some ugly parts in it.  Over time design decisions change.  Team members come and go.  SOAP doesn’t work out.  Yes, we all know the parts of a system that nobody wants to touch.

So, once a week, for 30 minutes all developers at Lonely Planet join a Mob that will stop at nothing before the nastiest section of code we can find is refactored, cleaned up or otherwise brought to submission.  The sessions are informal but indiscriminate – no part of the system is untouchable.  No blame is assigned, the only goal is to make the code base easier to work with.

Apart from having a cleaner code base Mob Refactoring has some other important benefits for us.  It helps to spread design (or “architecture” if you must) decisions across the team and solidifies shared practices.  Developers are exposed to parts of the system they wouldn’t otherwise touch and develop more confidence to change code to serve our business goals.