About the two books not covering how to deal with exiting code: You might find Michael Feathers Working Effectively with Legacy Code interesting. I think it’s very, very good.

Thank you for introducing me to such a good book.

IDEs generally provide “extract method” tools, but mine (Visual Studio) does not offer any tools to reorganize the code. Result, the code file is a stream of consciousness mess of short methods.

So, I think tool providers have to start looking at doing method extraction with code reorganization in mind if we are ever to truely exploit the techniques of CC and IP.

In addition, as we start “sorting” methods, we will also have problems with source code systems that will be continually finding change conflicts. So SCM tools have to start having method granularity rather than just code file granulatiry.

So I think if we are to adopt some of these techniques, the tool providers have to start inventing new tools that will help us structure code files more easily.

I think IP changed the way I code simply because at one point Beck talks about code symmetry.

For me, this was the first time I have seen code symmetry articulated, but I think when we look at asymmetric code we notice that “something is wrong”, even if we don’t know what it is.

For me this was the “big new thing” of the book and I am encouraging my co-workers to read the book, just to have the concept explained (in hopes that we start to write more symmetric code).

cheers.