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Discussion on: How much should you refactor names when domain terminology changes?

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ItsASine (Kayla)

Ha, my project at work has this issue. 2 years in and we're still finding things called "team" instead of "group".

Even with that project clouding my opinion, I still think every project should do a renaming. Especially since in an IDE like IntelliJ, it will rename all instances of the thing. You'll have to take the time to do a solid refactor rather than a find replace to do it right, but it'll pay off so much in the long run.

I tend to stick with the stance that good code should be documentation in and of itself, and a large part of that is having clear and descriptive naming conventions. If someone wanted a new person to the team to implement a fix to how displays are sorted, the new person could spend an hour or more hunting for that code and examples how to do it without knowing they were ever called monitors.