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Mob Refactoring

January 30, 2014

When teams try to take control of their technical debt and improve the maintainability of their codebase over time, one problem that can crop up is a lack of refactoring experience. Teams are often composed of developers with a mix of experience levels (both overall and within the application domain) and stylistic preferences, making it difficult for well-intentioned contributors to effect positive change.

There are a variety of techniques to help in these cases, but one I’ve had success with is “Mob Refactoring”. It’s a variant of Mob Programming, which is like pair programming with more than two people (though still with one computer). This sounds crazy at first, and I certainly don’t recommend working like this all the time, but it can be very effective for leveling up the refactoring abilities of the team and establishing shared conventions for style and structure of code.

Here’s how it works:

Assemble the team for an hour around a computer and a projector. It’s a great opportunity to order food and eat lunch together, of course.
Bring an area of the codebase that is in need of refactoring. Have one person drive the computer, while the rest of the team navigates.
Attempt to refactor the code as much as possible within the hour.
Don’t expect to produce production-ready code during these sessions. When you’re done, throw out the changes. Do not try to finish the refactoring after the session – it’s an easy way to get lost in the weeds.

The idea is that the value of the exercise is in the conversations that will take place, not the resulting commits. Mob Refactoring sessions provide the opportunity for less experienced members of the team to ask questions like, “Why do we do this like that?”, or for more senior programmers to describe different implementation approaches that have been tried, and how they’ve worked out in the past. The discussions will help close the experience gap and often lead to a new consensus about the preferred way of doing things.

Do this a few times, and rotate the area of focus and the lead each week. Start with a controller, then work on a model, or perhaps a troublesome view. Give each member of the team a chance to select the code to be refactored and drive the session. Even the least experienced member of your team can pick a good project – and they’ll probably learn more while by working on a problem that is on the top of their mind.

If you have a team that wants to get better at refactoring, but experience and differing style patterns are a challenge, give Mob Refactoring a try. It requires little preparation, and only an hour of investment (although I would recommend trying it three times before judging the effect). If you give it a go, let me know how it went for you in the comments.

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Our Series A and a new, open source edition of Code Climate

October 6, 2016

Today we’re excited to announce that Code Climate has raised $4.5M in Series A funding from Union Square Ventures (USV) and existing investors NextView Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Fuel Capital. Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at USV, is joining our board, and we’re excited to join USV’s portfolio of companies, which includes MongoDB, Twilio, Etsy, and others.

This is a major milestone for us, and we’re excited about what it means for the over 80,000 developers who use Code Climate to build and ship better software. We have a big vision for the future:

Empowering every software developer to improve the quality of their code and the outcomes of their projects with the most advanced, open and extensible platform for source code analytics.

Since our seed funding round in summer of 2014, we’ve introduced an open and extensible static analysis platform, shipped a major new edition of our on-premises product, and launched a powerful browser extension that brings code quality and test coverage information directly into the GitHub user interface.

We’ve grown to provide analysis for more than 90,000 repositories across 20+ programming languages and frameworks, and analyze two billion lines of code each day – making us the largest provider of cloud-based static analysis.

Here’s what our new investors had to say:

There is a common mantra that you can have any two in software: fast time to market, low cost of development, or high quality, but never all three. This, of course, is also what people used to believe about manufacturing before the rise of techniques such as lean manufacturing and continuous improvement. When you lead with quality in manufacturing you can, in fact, have quality, speed, and low cost. The same will be true for code, which makes assessing and managing the quality of code a key challenge for the coming years.

- Albert Wenger, Union Square Ventures

We completely agree, and we’re thrilled to have the resources to accelerate our work on this problem for years to come. To that end, we’d like to share a little about the next big thing in the works…

Coming soon: A new, open source edition of Code Climate

We’re working on an open source, standalone edition of the Code Climate application, which you’ll be able to download and run anywhere – including behind your firewall – completely free. We’re calling it Code Climate Community Edition (CE) for now and expect to ship an alpha version within a month.

It should come as no surprise that we’re huge fans of open source. We’ve long provided free service to open source projects, and last year we open sourced our static analysis engines and a command line interface (CLI) when we launched our open, extensible platform. We see providing a workflow-integrated code analytics experience as an open source package as the next big step in making Code Climate a ubiquitous part of every software developer’s toolbox, and hope you’re as excited about it as we are.

Great companies like GitLab and Travis CI have built thriving business around open source (or “open core”) offerings, and we thank them for their inspiration and innovation in these areas.

Since it will be possible to run the community edition of Code Climate for free, you may wonder what our plans are for revenue. In short, they don’t change much. We’ll continue to provide our cloud-based product at CodeClimate.com (still free for open source projects!) where we host and manage everything for you and keep things running smoothly. We’ll also continue to offer an “enterprise” edition of Code Climate for on-premises installs, with exclusive features and services focused on larger teams. We’ll have more to share when we release the Community Edition alpha.

We believe that every developer and every project can benefit from Code Climate from day one, and are happy to make that even easier for more organizations, regardless of their requirements for where they store their source code.

P.S. We’re hiring! If the vision we’re pursuing sounds appealing to you, we’d love to chat with you about joining our growing team in New York.

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