What is "gold plating" and why you should avoid it

I didn’t know what “gold plating” was until a senior engineer called it out on one of my code changes. I was clueless about what he meant, so I went to talk to him. This meeting ended up being a memorable lesson in my software engineering journey.

Wikipedia defines gold plating as: “the phenomenon of working on a project or task past the point of diminishing returns.” While the article talks about gold plating in the context of project management, the same phenomenon occurs in software development under a more familiar name: unnecessary refactoring.

The feedback I got from the senior engineer was that he noticed a pattern where I continued working on code that was already finished. I was polishing tests without covering new scenarios, changing perfectly fine variable or method names, or making functions slightly shorter.

I felt offended - I was making the code better!

How could a senior software engineer not see it?

How could they be against improving code?

So, he asked me to explain how my changes improved the code. I couldn’t. Only then did I realize he was right. I had to admit the new code was a bit different, but it wasn’t objectively better.

But then he went further and asked me how my changes impacted the team. I got confused: why would these small changes affect the team? It turned out they could and in a few ways.

I didn’t use my time effectively.

I spent time working on unimportant changes instead of taking on work that mattered. Therefore, someone else had to pick up tasks I could work on. If I did it, we could fix more bugs, implement more features, or ship faster. I also hurt myself - important work is usually a good learning opportunity and can lead to a quicker promotion, but I chose to pass on it.

I stole time from team members.

Code reviews were standard practice on every team I worked on in the past 20 years. Reviewing even small changes requires time. By requesting reviews of unneeded changes, I demanded that my team members spend time on trivialities.

Changing any code can lead to merge conflicts and disrupt other developer’s work. Sometimes, it is unavoidable. But it is not fun when changes no one needs cause conflicts.

I occasionally introduced issues.

A few times, my gold plating resulted in bugs. I missed an edge case in the new code, and somehow, tests didn’t catch it. The bug would break the build or make it to production. Having to justify fixing issues introduced by unnecessary changes is always embarrassing.

Not all refactoring is gold plating.

I am not trying to convince anyone that refactoring, in general, is a waste of time. In most cases, it’s the opposite. Refactoring code often aims to simplify implementing future changes, remove duplication, or make code more understandable. Sometimes, especially when deadlines loom, developers (myself included) make shortcuts or introduce hacks that are a ticking bomb. Removing them is the right thing to do, substantially improving the code quality. These kinds of refactoring are not gold plating. Gold plating is about changes we could live without without anyone noticing them.

Now that you know what gold plating is, whenever you decide to refactor some code, you should ask yourself: “Is it a real improvement, or am I just gold plating?”

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