Enforcing Consistency at Scale: Refactoring ShiftFlow to Match EventFlow Standards in HomeForged

The Cost of Inconsistency

A few months ago, HomeForged had a quiet problem: two critical systems—event-flow and shift-flow—were solving similar problems in wildly different ways. Both handled domain-side logic orchestration, but while event-flow had evolved into a clean, interface-driven pipeline with consistent middleware and naming, shift-flow was still a patchwork of static calls, hardcoded handlers, and ad-hoc execution.

At first, it seemed harmless. "If it works, don’t touch it," right? But as we added features, the cracks showed. New developers would implement a pattern from event-flow, only to find it didn’t apply in shift-flow. Debugging became a game of context-switching between two mental models. Testing was uneven—some flows had full coverage, others relied on brittle integration tests because the units were too entangled to isolate.

The real cost wasn’t in bugs—it was in cognitive load. Every time someone touched shift-flow, they had to re-learn its quirks. That’s not scalable.

Refactoring Toward Unity

The goal wasn’t just cleanup—it was alignment. We wanted shift-flow to feel like event-flow because, functionally, they are the same kind of system: sequences of domain actions triggered by user or system events.

The refactor started with naming. We renamed classes and methods to match event-flow’s conventions: ShiftHandler became ShiftAction, executeShift() became handle(). This wasn’t vanity—it made it instantly clearer what each class did, especially for devs already familiar with one system.

Next, we enforced interface consistency. We introduced a shared ActionContract that both flows now implement. This gave us predictable method signatures, standardized return types, and a clear contract for what an "action" means in HomeForged:

interface ActionContract
{
    public function handle(): void;
}

Suddenly, middleware became reusable. We already had a stack for logging, timing, and exception handling in event-flow. By aligning shift-flow’s structure, we could plug in the same middleware without modification. No more rewriting the same logic in slightly different ways.

We also standardized how actions are dispatched. Instead of calling ShiftManager::run() with a string identifier, we now use a dedicated dispatcher that accepts action instances—just like event-flow. This made dependency injection cleaner and opened the door for future enhancements like queued actions or dry-run modes.

One of the most impactful changes was introducing a unified extension system. Before, adding a custom step to a shift required editing core files. Now, we use a registration pattern inspired by event-flow’s plugin hooks:

ShiftFlow::extend('post-processing', ProcessShiftMetrics::class);

This not only made the system more extensible but also reduced the risk of merge conflicts in core logic.

Gains Beyond Clean Code

The immediate win was fewer bugs. With consistent patterns, it became harder to introduce off-by-one errors or forget cleanup steps. But the deeper benefits emerged over time.

Debugging got easier. When every action follows the same flow—middleware, handle(), predictable side effects—logging and tracing become trivial. We now get uniform debug output across both systems, which has cut down investigation time for edge cases by at least half.

Test coverage improved not because we wrote more tests, but because the code became testable. Isolated actions with clear inputs and side effects meant we could write fast, reliable unit tests instead of leaning on slow browser tests. Our shift-flow test suite went from 68% to 94% coverage with minimal effort—most of the gaps were in now-removed legacy paths.

Onboarding is smoother too. New team members can learn one pattern and apply it across the app. I’ve lost count of how many times someone’s said, "Oh, this works just like event-flow? Got it," and shipped a feature without asking for help.

Consistency isn’t about rigid rules—it’s about reducing friction. By aligning shift-flow with event-flow, we didn’t just fix a module. We strengthened the entire architecture’s ability to evolve without breaking.

That’s the kind of refactor that pays dividends long after the last rename.