> I asked the developer and they told me, "I have this philosophy that says when you have only two of something, it's better to just copy and paste the code, but of course when you get to the third one you want to start to think about refactoring and combining them."
I would argue this is a good rule of thumb, but nothing should ever be a hard unbreakable rule. The usual refactoring rules should apply too: if 95% of the code is the same, you should probably go back and refactor even without a third use case because it sounds like the two use cases are really just one use case with slight variation.
I would argue this is a good rule of thumb, but nothing should ever be a hard unbreakable rule. The usual refactoring rules should apply too: if 95% of the code is the same, you should probably go back and refactor even without a third use case because it sounds like the two use cases are really just one use case with slight variation.