The Importance of Application Refactoring

September 25, 2019

Monthly Traffic is up, product purchases are way up, concurrent users are through the roof and alongside is your revenue. What is next? What cool new feature can take your consistent growth to exponential growth? It’s probably not what you think. One thing that can take your company’s application to the next level may not be a feature at all, it’s refactoring. Refactoring is the process of “Spring Cleaning” with software and applications, and it is one of the most common practices that gets overlooked by a rapidly growing Software As A Service(SAAS) company.

Adding new features and functionality to your application is fantastic and they are often architected to save a business extraordinary amounts of time and effort. However, a natural build up of clutter comes along with consistent development on a project. Refactoring allows the developers to re-evaluate the future plans of the application to ensure that there are no loose ends and that all of the existing functionality remains easily expandable with the continued growth of the business.

This may not have an immediate visible impact on your business, but the impact can be massive. What refactoring does is help your application stay lean, which allows your developers to continue building new features without being held back by clutter in the system. This will require less development time for new features, reducing costs and giving your company growth through ways you may have not even known to exist. 

When to Refactor?

There are not exactly right or wrong times to refactor. Just like the upkeep on your house, there are certain activities that need to happen outside of your typical day to day cleaning. We like to plan for refactoring after a couple of major projects, or after several smaller projects. The best way to know if it is time to refactor is by communicating with your developers on areas within that application that pose regular setbacks or on areas that seem to “fight back.”

Why spend extra time refactoring? Shouldn’t it be a part of development?

Refactoring is not just a normal cleaning of an application’s codebase. It often means rebuilding functionality to replace it with a more scalable version. Refactoring should be treated as a project of its own because it requires developers to rip out core aspects of the service and replace them with newer components. 

To maintain a healthy ecosystem of your entire business, you need to take proper care of the application that runs it. This often means halting the production of new features to make time for the upkeep tasks that will allow your developers to grow your application as fast as your business. Refactoring is absolutely vital in a fast growing business to ensure that there is room to scale and can very easily save your business from a very costly rebuild. 

Interested in learning more about how refactoring can help your software solution? Contact Us today!

Let’s Start a Web Design Project

Talk with a Web Strategist.