Entries Tagged ‘Software Refactoring’

Do you refactor embedded software?

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012 by Robert Cravotta

Software refactoring is an activity where software is transformed in such a way that preserves the external behavior while improving the internal software structure. I am aware of software development tools that assist with refactoring application software, but it is not clear whether design teams engage in software refactoring for embedded code – especially for control systems.

Refactoring was not practiced in the projects I worked on; in fact, the team philosophy was to make only the smallest change necessary when working with a legacy system to affect the change needed. First, we never had the schedule or budget needed just to make the software “easier to understand or cheaper to modify.”  Second, changing the software for “cosmetic” purposes could cause an increase in downstream engineering efforts, especially in the area of verifying that the changes did not break the behavior of the system under all relevant operating conditions. Note that many of the control projects I worked on were complex enough that it was difficult just to ascertain whether the system worked properly or just coincidently looked like it did.

Most of the material I read about software refactoring assumes the software targets the application layer of software which is not tightly coupled to a specific hardware target and is implemented in an object oriented language, such as Java or C++. Are embedded developers performing software refactoring? If so, do you perform it on all types of software or are there types of software that you definitely include or exclude from a refactoring effort?