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Evolutionary Design: Normalize Growth

Evolutionary Design: Normalize Growth

The Definitions

Evolutionary Design is the practice of creating the components and interactions of a system while it is evolving, on the basis of the client requirements and user needs.

Normalization refers to a process that makes something more normal or regular

Normalization may refer to more sophisticated adjustments where the intention is to bring the entire probability distributions of adjusted values into alignment from Wikipedia

Growth refers to a positive change in size, and/or maturation, often over a period of time from Wikipedia

 

The Moment

I am a big fan of gardening. Whenever I can, I take care of my plants and think about subjects like Evolutionary Design. One moment I was taking care of my young tomato plants: I needed to rip the small leaves that grow and just take the food away from the flowers and fruits. And it struck me: any gardener is doing Evolutionary Design.

pruning

Legacy Code is Fear

Talk: Easier to change CODE

Talk: Easier to change CODE This is a talk from I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2016, Bucharest. It is a hands-on talk, where I refactor some code live with the help of the audience. Techniques During this… 

Legacy Code Extract Class

Legacy Coderetreat: Part 12 – Extract class

Extract Class

Blog post series

This blog post is part of a series about legacy coderetreat and legacy code techniques you can apply during your work. Please click to see more sessions about legacy code.

Purpose

When working with existing code we need to look at the responsibilities of existing classes. If one class is too big, we need to extract new classes from that initial class. A class too big means that it’s not respecting the Single Responsibility Principle.

Extract Class
Extract Class
Legacy Code from Nothing to System Tests

Legacy Coderetreat: Part 2 – From Nothing to System Tests

From Nothing to System Tests

Blog post series

This blog post is part of a series about legacy coderetreat and legacy code techniques you can apply during your work. Please click to see more sessions about legacy code.

Purpose

Whenever I need to change an existing system I need a safety net. These system tests knit a coarse safety net, very good if you want to have the safety of changing code later without introducing defects.

This is the first thing I usually do when I start working with a system that:

  • does not have any automated tests
  • is totally unknown to me

This safety net will be used during the next phases when the code will be refactored and cleaned-up, before being modified. Now let’s see a bit about the concept of this session.

from-nothing-to-system-tests
From Nothing to System Tests