This article really buries the most important lesson about refactoring: > I didn’t talk to the person who wrote it. I rewrote the code and checked it in without their input. Even if it was an improvement (which I don’t believe anymore), this is a terrible way to go about it. A healthy engineering team is constantly building trust. Rewriting your teammate’s code without a discussion is a huge blow to your ability to e…
Why one should ask to the original developer if the code can be modified? If I see a code I want to change, I do it. I don't ask for permission. And colleagues can do the same with code I wrote. We trust each other.
Two reasons, one technical, one social. Firstly, the original developer probably spent more hours thinking over and working on that bit of code than you have -- so maybe they had a good reason for doing it the way they did. You won't know unless you ask them. Secondly, I think it's a fairly natural and common human behaviour that when you spend a lot of time working on or making something that you feel some degree of satisfaction, pride and investment in the result. Even in a cooperative joint endeavour that is striving to avoid an idea of individual "ownership" of parts of the project, I think it can be helpful sometimes to acknowledge that feeling of investment by consulting the original author before walking in and radically changing something they did.