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Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Refactoring Standards

Code and standards (which are a special kind of code) grow with age.  When you started with your code, you had a plan.  It was fairly simple and so you wrote something simple, and it worked.  After a while you realized you could make it do something special by tweaking a little piece of it. Sometimes (if you designed it right), you can add significant functionality.  After a while, you have this thing that has grown to be quite complex.  Nobody would ever design it that way from the start (or maybe they would if they had infinite time and money), but it surely works.

The growth can be well-ordered, or it can have some benign little outgrowths, or they can even be tumorous.  Uncontrolled growth can be deadly, whether to a biological or a computer system.  You have to watch how things grow all the time.  After some time, the only solution may be a knife. Sometimes the guts of the patient will be majorly overhauled afterwards, even though fully functioning and alive.

When the normal adaptive processes work in standards, these growths naturally get pruned back.
It's interesting to watch some of the weird outgrowths of CCR become more and more vestigial over time through various prunings in CCD and CCDA.  FHIR on the other hand, well, that started as a major restructuring of V3 and CDA, and is very much on the growing side.

   -- Keith

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