Some years ago, a co-worker introduced our software development team to a concept known as a “Weasel Word”, a positive sounding word meant to give the illusion of positive outcome when the truth may be otherwise. For example, given the following statement; “We are essentially complete with that task”, one could jump the the conclusion that they were indeed done, where in fact, nothing in that statement actually communicates a clear statement in fact.
So I ask the question; When did re-factoring become a “Weasel Word”? When did “Re-Write” become “Re-Factor”? As I sit here, I am responding to an RFP for a California based company to evaluate the issues they are having with a SAAS based offering in the Compliance space. The CEO informs me that they are having issues with multi-tenancy as it relates to user accounts and the visibility of information across the application in general as specifically when multiple “Portlets” are presented to the user.
On a conference call, the development team informed me that all hands are “Re-Factoring” the credentials and user-roles functionality in order to address the problem. Pending completion of the migration scripts, they should be able to begin test within 4 weeks. Probing into the changes resulted in my learning that there were substantially more tables, new foreign keys, lots more goo. Now, without the visibility into the old versus new code, I’m not going to say their first implementation was overly simplistic, much as I’m not going to say their new code was overly complex, but what I will say is stop lying about what you are trying to accomplish.
Every Re-Factoring exercise I have been through has had the goal of moving towards a more effective level of abstraction for a given business process. Rather than tell the truth about the development teams real progress, they left the CEO with the mistaken assumption that they were farther along then they actually were.
As I complete this post, a process that has taken months from when I started this this team has yet to complete the whole task. The mythical 4 weeks became 10 for a partial implementation as they quickly found other issues as well.